STELLA IN HEAVEN

It looks a lot like Pulitzer-winning humorist and proficient memoirist Buchwald (I'll Always Have Paris, 1996, etc.) has dipped into the depths of his filing cabinet to fish out this largely wan attempt at the art of fiction.

The tale is formed by alternating bits of commentary from protagonist Roger Folger (a name surely not the one the character was born with) and his deceased wife, Stella. The late Mrs. Folger, recently removed from Forest Hills, New York, relaxes by the pool at the celestial counterpart of Florida's Ritz-Carlton. She is in contact with her husband via some sort of supernal cell phone (and, given the progress of technology, such a thing seems as plausible as the rest of the fable). With a willful daughter (who becomes an unwed mother) and a soulful son (who rejected a bar mitzvah), the Folger family performs as if in a sitcom of sorts. Dead Stella and live Roger both have comical sidekicks. To add to the typical high jinks, there's Stella's mother-in-law, who arrives in Heaven and raises Hell. (The radical mother-in-law, mention of Timothy Leary, and references to young Folger's service in Vietnam give the text a certain musty quality.) The story: Stella tries to provide a new spouse for her husband. He’ll make an independent choice, however—one that will come as no surprise to anyone. Of course, Buchwald, who has conquered nearly every form of writing (save, perhaps, computer software and SAT questions), sports a clever intelligence. His attempt at fiction does, perforce, contain flashes of wisdom and a natural patina of humor. But in the subcategory of dead spousal influence, he's not quite up to Noël Coward or even Thorne Smith.

Light, fey fiction from an author who’s clearly a man of the world as well as a man of letters. His reputation still rests on his political commentary, his well-crafted memoirs, and all those funny columns.