Spy High

I suppose it's my fault that I still think of Henry Alford, Ted Heller, and Elissa Schappell as "the kids" at Spy magazine. That's what they were 10 years ago, when I was the satirical monthly's esteemed critic-at-large and they were the eager beavers of the junior staff, pushing round the tea trolleys, fetching me the Daily Racing Form, and doing the odd bit of writing and reporting. But how things have changed! The new century finds me semi-retired and semi-forgotten—very occasionally I'll get a commission from Prevention to write about sex after 70—while Henry, Ted, and Elissa are now grown-up, full-blown literistas, each with a brand-new book out!

Alford's Big Kiss (Villard) is his second volume of "investigative humor," a genre he pretty much has all to himself. This time, he's trying to break into acting by any means necessary—whether it entails getting his autographed 8-by-10 hung up in Manhattan diners, polishing his craft by working as a phone-sex operator, or attending an improv camp with his sexagenarian mother. As Whistler said to Wilde, "Very witty." Heller's first novel, Slab Rat (Scribner), is a smart, comic evocation of the magazine business. His wiseacre protagonist, Zachary Post, works for a suspiciously familiar-sounding company called Versailles Publishing. It's like reading Nick Hornby crossed with Budd Schulberg crossed with Cliff Odets and Ernie Lehman in Sweet Smell of Success mode—aces! Schappell's Use Me (Morrow) is the most out-and-out literary of the three books, a cycle of interrelated short stories about a young woman, Evie Wakefield, who is simultaneously dealing with becoming an adult-slash-mom and losing her beloved father to cancer. This is no Gloomy Gus trawl through Despairland, though; Schappell uses her Spy cleverness to cut through the darkness, as in this description of a deranged Park Avenue matron: "Sunny is one of those blazered geeks

you see trotting poodles in formation, bribing them with liver snaps to stand still on a

table while some stranger gropes their with-ers." I'll dust off an old expression I used to employ in delightful moments like these: Oooofl -WALTER MONHEIT

WALTER MONHEIT