The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Best known in this country for his cartoon version of The Waste Land, British cartoonist Rowson (Lower Than Vermin: An Anatomy of Thatcher's Britain, etc.) rises to a new challenge in this comic-book rewrite of Laurence Sterne's nine-volume 1767 masterpiece. Solemn figures like Eliot, Marx and the Iron Lady are, after all, longstanding objects of fun: it's easy to laugh at a sourpuss. But Tristram Shandy is already just about as cartoonish as The Great Books get: a mock-novel packed equally with philosophical digressions and physical comedy. Rowson never quite gets around this obstacle; he simply goes over the top by trying to out-bawdy the bawdy and out-slapstick the slapstick. Near the middle of the book, Oliver Stone starts filming a movie version of Uncle Toby's military misadventures (""From a Place Called Namur to Hell and Back""). That's the sort of spoof this is, and Rowson makes it the occasion for parodies of a surprising range of graphic predecessors, not just Hogarth and Piranesi, but also Durer, Beardsley and Grosz (to name a few of his many un-Augustan pictorial lampoons). (Nov.)