One of my favorite characters in fiction is the Storekeeper in Phil Stong’s 1932 novel, State Fair. The Storekeeper is a cautious, skeptical fellow who believes that “Heaven ordains all things for the worst but more mischievously than tragically.” So don’t get too cocky: Don’t take the chains off your tires (it’s 1932 rural America, remember) just because it’s spring. Heaven may have plenty of mud in store and definitely will if you do take them off.

I’ve probably spent too much of my allotted span reading second and third-rate fiction, but I thought of the Storekeeper while reading Calvin Trillin’s Family Man. In these ruminations/memoirs about family life, Trillin holds, perhaps only half-jocularly, to a similar belief, the Evil Eye: “People who treat the Evil Eye with some respect can tell you that anyone handing out advice about family and thus implying that he and his family are so blessed, so close to perfection that it behooves them to share with others the secret of their success is asking for trouble.” Trillin skirts trouble with humor and dispenses only one really solid bit of advice to prospective parents: “Try to get one that doesn’t spit up.” Beyond that, he says, “your children are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary.” The rest is indeed commentary on the obvious fact that his two daughters, Abigail and Sarah, have been the center of his and his wife Alice’s life and exceedingly funny commentary it is. Though this book will be enjoyed by anyone who appreciates humor above the level of the hotfoot (not such a huge crowd, at that, in Adam Sandler’s America), it will be especially appreciated by anyone who happens to share Trillin’s prejudices and outlook.

For instance, in commenting on his family’s viewing and marching in the free-form, amateurish Halloween parades in their neighborhood of Greenwich Village, he says, “My interest in parades is usually limited by my failure to appreciate floats,” which rigidly separate paraders and spectators.

Exactly! Why, with such an attitude, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear him say that clowns are not funny. He doesn’t, but he comes close in disparaging most children’s theater, in which “children would shrink into the corner of their seats as foolishly dressed people on-stage favored them with stupid pratfalls or double entendres that would make ,musicals, like Pippin and West Side Story, that trigger both laughs and a child’s sense of awe.

Though he might not be charmed by the comparison, as a humorist Trillin is a lot like H. Allen Smith, of blessed memory and such titles as Low Man on a Totem Pole. His approach, it might be said, is one thing leads to another. A chapter that starts out discussing changes in wedding conventions leads to the time he didn’t have a spare hand with which to comfort his wife in the delivery room because one hand was holding the wallet he was advised not to leave in the locker while the other was holding up the scrub pants with played-out elastic he was given to wear.

Throughout, there is a noticeable strain of the amusing old duffer (even when younger) whom the daughters have to keep in line, of every sitcom sappy pappy from Chester A. Riley to Archie Bunker. But then, he admits that he tends toward the sitcom tone of voice when writing about domestic matters.

Behind it, though, is a definite bedrock of sophisticated common sense, revealed in the remark that both he and Alice “had upbringings whose essential squareness we valued.” It’s no accident that their daughters, though born in that era, did not end up with names like Moon Unit.

Though Trillin has lived all his adult life in New York City, “Alice and I both found something off-putting in New York kids we heard about who seemed not just overprivileged but oversavvy,” and so from time to time they would take the girls “back home” for a “booster shot” of his native Kansas City, which he concedes has never left him.

Because, he writes, “I believe that the only time parents are absolutely relaxed about the safety and well-being of their child, of any age, is when that child is under the parents’ own roof, fast asleep.” That’s one truism that all parents whose children are the center of their life can say “amen” to, regardless of the state of their sense of humor. Reviewed by Roger Miller.

vid portrait of a time of flux in an ancient country, Peter Hessler’s River Town is a moving account of his experiences as a foreigner or waiguoren in small-town China. Hessler, who spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in a city called Fuling, a Yangtze River town in southwestern China, taught English and American literature at Fuling Teachers College, and the classroom provides the backdrop for many of the events that comprise his impressive first book. Hessler provides lucid narration of his time at the college, recounting moments of humor and gravity in wonderful, precise detail. Many of his shy, eager students are of the peasant stock that populates the remote countryside, and some of them have taken on American names. His classes contain a male student named Daisy, as well as a young woman who calls herself Keller, in honor of Helen Keller. Teaching always a reciprocal process is especially so in this case, as eye-opening for Hessler as it is for his pupils. Preoccupied with politics, the young people are diehard Communists, and party rhetoric invades analyses of Hamlet and Robin Hood. With the finesse of a great teacher, Hessler manages to steer his students in more appropriate directions. “I wasn’t so enthusiastic about Shakespeare’s becoming a party spokesman,” he writes.

Mixed in with Hessler’s account of his teaching duties in Fuling are history-making events like the return of Hong Kong to the control of the mainlaind Chinese government and the death of Deng Xiaoping. Blending these momentous happenings with everyday incidents, Hessler delivers a balanced look at his time as a stranger in a strange land. In the end, for the author, the townspeople become a source of both animosity and support. While he experiences regular heckling because he is a foreigner, Hessler also makes friends among the restaurateurs whose establishments he frequents. He even spends the night before Chinese New Year with the family of one of the restaurant owners. “They knew that I was alone on the holiday, and I was their friend; nothing else mattered,” Hessler writes. “They were simply big-hearted people and that was the best meal I ever had in China.” Eliza McGraw writes from Maryland.

Of course Jon Katz plugs his own book on Amazon.com’s Web site. After all, Geeks is about the way the Internet is changing people’s lives. It’s about people making connections, especially the kind of people the lost people who have trouble connecting in the real world. He says tongue-in-cheek that he wrote Geeks in an open source fashion. That is, he wrote columns on the themes that Geeks would focus on, published them on the Web, and responses flooded in. These responses fed more writing, which he again posted.

One of Katz’s thousands of e-mails was from Jesse Dailey, a teenage boy in Middleton, Idaho. Jesse and his friends had started their very own Geek Club at school, proudly referring to themselves with the name once used to disparage them. Dailey and Katz began corresponding regularly, and, before too long, they met in Idaho.

Geeks aims to document the ongoing Geek Ascendancy in which the geeks highly intelligent, long-despised nonconformists are at the forefront of the technological revolution, wielding new power. They are running the systems that run the world. To illustrate, Katz documents Jesse’s upward movement from Middleton into the professional, social, and academic worlds of Chicago.

Jesse is almost always accompanied by his best friend Eric Twilegar, whose story Katz also tells. Eric, however, is less likely to win friends and less forthcoming with his thoughts and feelings. You get the feeling that if it weren’t for Jesse, Eric never would have left Idaho.

The most powerful part of Geeks deals with the Columbine High School tragedy. The contrast between Dailey’s success and Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris’s murders/suicides is chilling. In the wake of the shootings, Katz is saddened that the cost of being different just went up (i.e., two disturbed individuals brought about a backlash against all things non-mainstream). While conventional wisdom maintains that playing violent videogames makes teenagers depressed, murderous, and suicidal, Katz questions the assumed cause-effect. What if troubled teenagers are depressed before they begin spending so many hours online? What if, for the first time in their lives, these lost people are finding friends? What if the Internet is actually a solace to those who have been hurt in the real world? Online community, Katz makes clear throughout Geeks, may be second to the real thing. But it sure beats nothing.

Ask Jesse and Eric.

Robin Taylor is a Web project manager and technical writer for an IT company in Washington, D.C.

Few writers create narrative threads so closely following the process of memory as Roy Blount, Jr. All the more apt that his memoir, Be Sweet: A Conditional Love Story, manages to collect a swarming beehive of memories, incidents, stories, and mild exaggerations, bundle them together with a humorists’ half-knot of narrative, and make it read like a revelation. In his search to explain and remove the “family curse” as he calls it, Blount ventures forth into the realm of what it means to be both middle-aged and a humorist and whether there is a connection between the two at all. Dominating all is that litany those two little words from his mother repeated to Blount the child, “be sweet,” that seemed to have set him on this journey in the first place. Confiding without resorting to confession, the memoir’s first chapter sets the tone and tenor of what will be an irreverent, jumbled, nonlinear trek. It starts with pieces of Blount’s childhood in Georgia and ends with a resolution and at least a partial sense of closure with the most complex figure in his life the lonely, abused, orphan girl that was his mother. As stories spawn more stories, the reader comes to realize digression is Blount’s chosen path toward that closure he seeks.

A commentary on the memories that make up memoirs, Be Sweet is not content only to revisit these collected stories of a family’s past: Blount intends for the reader to participate in the very process itself. Partly, this is what it means to be a humorist in this ironic, disaffected age. But most of all, Blount see this as the most direct way to convey the honesty of an author dredging the past for answers. And the amount of material, sheer hilarious material, brought to the surface is amazing. A lengthy, near scholarly chapter, “Junior,” ruminates on the accomplishments and failings of numerous famous juniors and how they must “resist the temptation to become second bananas.” Then it evolves into a touching examination of the relationship between Blount and his namesake father. Similarly, another section begins with Blount detailing the requisite self-loathing required of any humorist worth his salt and ends with a look at the difficult childhood burden his mother had to bear and how Blount credits such a past for his sense of humor. Moving from the more universal of his experiences to the intimate, revealing moments, Blount’s knack for finding the perfect ironic voice never falters.

A resolute and unflinching name-dropper, Blount recounts one ridiculous anecdote after another in this journey that touches on the movie stars, famous athletes, and well-known politicians he has hobnobbed with. At times, the story may brilliantly fit the narrative; other times, it begins to feel like you are sitting at the foot of a master storyteller, just hanging on for gems, not sure what is coming next.

You cannot help but feel it is intentional. Does the humorist drive the “message” of the book or is it the “message” driving and intensifying the humor? Either way, you read on, and it works. Being sweet, as we learn, may demand too much for the average person. Being funny is a walk in the park for Roy Blount, Jr.

Reviewed by Todd Keith.

Back to where they once belonged: the Beatles score more hits There are at least a dozen clever and cute ways I thought about starting this piece. When I had four books to cover, a play on