Perelman has every right to be a bit bushed by now, forty-one years and eighteen books after his debut, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge, which crashed into public notice coincidentally with the stock market. Yet aside from the title, which he seems to have thought of in about five minutes while lying in a hammock, Baby, It's Cold Inside (remember that song?) shows the Bubba of Bucks County as alert to cliché, as pugnacious to pretense, as frenetic and fallible as ever….

The manic mixtures of levels of diction (a freshman sin, but Perelman's chief stylistic glory), the outrageous puns …, the poetic names (Charismé Ismay, President Butterfoss, Irene Nemesis), are as piquant as ever….

You don't hardly find writing like that any more, but the sad fact is that Perelman—or maybe his peculiar genre—is rather irrelevant and dated. A sense of strain, a clutching for effect does mark...