Perelman prose at its pure best, as everybody knows, is highly concentrated stuff. Every line and word count; it is as deadly accurate, as carefully organized and as impressionistic as high comedy or poetry. When this special stuff is given us in its natural form—the set piece—it is wonderful. But when it's made to cover a world journey [as it is in "Westward Ha!: Around the World in 80 Cliches"] it loses its charms with its shape. When writing that's really a high comic performance has to serve for a long sustained account of a trip, taking us over actual hill and dale and following true-life narratives and the known maps, not to mention keeping two strange characters—Perelman and [illustrator Al Hirschfeld]—alive and in recognizable human guise before us, then the demand on the prose is not a fair one….

We ought not to look...