Unlike his 18th-century namesake, the hero of this outrageous "modern comedy" [Boswell] is as undiscriminating in his admiration of great men as an autograph collector. His fate, he is told as a boy by an eminent psychologist (his first in-the-flesh celebrity), is to be a holder of coats, a sitter at the captain's table, a persona grata.

As a professional wrestler in a bout with The Angel of Death, Boswell suddenly realizes that everybody dies, and the knowledge propels him into a parasitic gluttony of the ego, a series of formless monomaniac adventures on a relentless search for VIP's, at whose feet he curls like a worshipful puppy. The world's richest man, history's first international revolutionist, a Nobel Prize-winning anthropologist, an Italian principessa—all these and others Boswell pursues even while he knows that Stanley (Lawrence) Elkin 1930– Photograph by Debra Bailinthe frailties of the great are as...