MY LIFE AS A SMALL BOY

Like its author, this collection of short pieces via small town Americana is quietly funny, quietly touching and quietly slick. An extremely wholesome book, it is saturated with pleasant evocations of childhood and lovable displays of Yankee wisdom. It should not only delight Cox's TV fans, but also provide a fine respite from all those done-to-death Freudian investigations of a similar terrain. It even boasts drawings by Wally, suitably naive, and one or two skits, just right for reading aloud. It divides itself between life at home and life at school, resurrecting along the way Secret Codes, Post Toastie box tops, Art classes, Bullying, Omniscient Mama, the Cops, Fun in the Snow, the First Cigarette, Friendships and all the other usual album bits. Most of it is strictly anecdotal, written in the monologue style of a comic more familiar with the Reader's Digest than with the Broadway joke book. On occasion, Cox manages a charming wistfulness and a canny sense of the sure touch, as when he narrates how he and his cronies plagued a poor thing called Nasty Virginia, or when he got caught in a girlish Scotsman rig-out for a school play. There are more ambitious reflections concerning a winter adventure and a quaintly snappy appraisal of what's wrong with the teaching of literature. Too slight in both conception and execution for it ever to duplicate the You Go? Out sales, Small Boy should nevertheless get a from the nostalgia addicts.