Pure Drivel

In this ingeniously funny collection of humorous riffs, those who thought Steve Martin's gifts were confined to the screen will discover what readers of The New Yorker magazine already know: that Martin is a master of the written word. From a piece sending up the logistics of celebrity ("The Nature of Matter and Its Antecedents") to a story that is half love letter to Los Angeles and half satiric portrait of a New York writer writing about L. A. ("Hissy Fit"), the book's pieces, some of which first appeared in The New Yorker, are both hilariously funny and intelligent in their skewering of the topic at hand. With unparalleled literary ventriloquism. Martin imagines what Walter Matthau's face could tell about how we reveal ourselves to the world, who Lolita might be now, and what goes through the head of a "bad dog." In perhaps the funniest and most quintessentially Steve Martin piece, "Writing Is Easy, " Martin explains, among other things, how writers in Czechoslovakia might come up with more depressing material than L.A. writers.