Perelman was never restrained but always reticent. You might think his posthumous book, The Last Laugh, would break new ground, especially since it includes a few sketches from his proposed but incomplete autobiography.

Here, the avid Perelman reader might think, we shall get down to the nitty-gritty of life. But the sketches of Nathanael West, his brother-in-law, and of Dorothy Parker, whom he knew for years and years, are curiously impersonal and might have been written (as far as emotional intensity is concerned) by any interviewer from a newspaper who had spent an afternoon with them.

This does not mean his last book is inferior to his other work, not at all. It is more of the same. And that, in this age so prone to tedium in letters, is a gift worth having….

The question arises, with Perelman, why people can be found who quite dislike his...