Stephen Wright's "Harold"

Steven Wright has written a book. It is a funny book. It would have to be for such a man. He is a comedian who has mastered the art of the punchline, instantly quotable and brilliant. It is called ''Harold''.

Steven Wright has written a book about a seven-year-old boy named Harold (a fortunate thing, since it is also the title). His middle name is Alexander. He is in love with a girl in his class named Elizabeth...and maybe his teacher, Ms. Yuka (it often seems that way). There are no other romantic attachments in his young life.

Harold is a very imaginative boy. He love math, movies, baseball (the Boston Red Sox), his grandfather, the girl I mentioned earlier (Elizabeth), and he has a very interesting point of view on how the world works.

He also has a very interesting idea of how ideas enter his mind. A rectangle begins to form and birds enter his mind; often birds that have never existed and never will exist (perfect for a seven-year-old boy bored at school). Some of the species are quite familiar; others left me amazed.

Those of you who know the comedy and routines of Mr. Wright will be quite happy with this earlier version of the comedian (and let's be honest, since it is clearly himself that Mr. Wright is writing about). And for those of you who have not seen his routine, enjoy this link:

And please, take him seriously. He is also an Academy Award winner for Live-Action Short in 1989 for the following:

I am a fan; I continue to be a fan. And that may be why I found this book so frustrating. Whether he is at school, or imagines himself on a spaceship on the moon drinking a very special type of water and interrogating Carl Sagan (yes, all of that is in the book), it feels like your stepping off on too many different paths. It is frustrating when you are given hints to things happening in the kid's family that seem interesting and dramatic...but are never explored (his mother seems to be having problems that the boy cannot face).

Here are a few quotes from the book:

Two small birds that obviously knew each other flew through the rectangle extremely fast with the tips of their wings almost touching. They were so close they brought one thought which was another play called The Reverse Birthday.

This revolved around the fact that every year a person is alive they pass the date that they're going to die but they don't know it. So Harold thought that in the play there could be a magic mirror that you hold up to your birthday date and it shows the date that you die. Then people would have two parties a year to celebrate rather than just one. The second party would be to celebrate that you had a life to live.

That's one. Here is another one (a little longer):

He would grow up to question all authority and had already started. I don't know if you noticed or not but in this story he hardly mentions his own mother. That in itself is a reverse announcement. He looked down at the beach from the deck of the spaceship. The beautiful ocean that continued all the way to the moon's horizon. Past the horizon was the black velvet darkness where sitting, floating was the blue and white earth which from that distance was about the size of a marble. Beyond the earth were thousands and thousands of tiny stars. Harold knew his brain was way out of its league in regards to the universe. The traveling starlight was just one of the many concepts in life he had to block out because it was just too hard to understand. It confused everything. He looked to the right. Carl and Elizabeth were sitting there with their feet over the edge of the deck. They were now playing two concertinas, little accordions like from the time of the Civil War.

What were they playing? The hit song ''Spanish Eyes'' by Al Martino. Harold noticed Anthony standing at the far end of the deck quietly singing along. He was wearing a Merle Haggard T-shirt. The bird cast a small shadow of himself onto the wooden deck.

Harold wondered if something could cast a shadow of something other than itself.

And on and on... I have cheated by putting the sentences together in larger paragraphs to save a little space here, but the work is very bite-size and very...epigrammatic? Very...comical? Yes, you are in the head of a future talent at the microphone and in the spotlight; a very noisy space. For this alone, it is indeed an interesting tale. But a novel...no, it is not.

Let us hope for a sequel for those difficult teen years.

Good to find this one, too:

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