The Comedy Writer

At 33, Henry Halloran has had enough. His girlfriend has dumped him, and his job as a salesman in Boston is unfulfilling, so he chucks it all and heads to Hollywood to make it as a screenwriter. That's the high concept in this amusing but superficial writer-goes-to-movieland tale set in the early 1990s. Halloran's a regular guy: he drinks beer, shoots hoops, ogles large-breasted women, worries about his virility. But he has a dream; his toughmindedness and honesty open doors and he lands an agent. Farrelly, the screenwriter and director who brought us Kingpin and Dumb and Dumber and the novel Outside Providence introduces his hero to a motley collection of seedy West Coast types: a busty nympho neighbor, a psychotic producer, a dwarf psychiatrist and, most important, a mysterious suicide and her surviving sister, an endearingly hopeless basket case who attaches herself to Halloran, inveigles herself into his bed and makes his life miserable. She's an nightmare Holly Golightly for the '90s. Farrelly's taste for slapstick and scatological humor will either delight or offend, according to the reader's taste. Oddly (considering Halloran's screenwriting talent), this first-person narrative reads like a diary or a theme paper called ""What I did in L.A."" The snappy one-liners amuse us without interesting us in the guy who makes them up. (May)