HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU, KIDS!

Humorist O'Neill (Daddy Cool, 1988, not reviewed) delivers an often hilarious, sometimes touching account of the trials and epiphanies of family life. The subtitle is misleading: most of these essays explore the romance between parents and their children. O'Neill expands entertainingly on the many obstacles this romance must surmount: juvenile basement theatricals, the purgatory of family travel, fantasy games with rules known only to the child and with dad cast as a chicken, nonnegotiable endless demands to ``Dance wis me, Daddy!'' and sleep deprivation (to which O'Neill's sensible solution is, get into it: ``jump the conformist high noon tracks of your life and prowl a gray-white world of visions and dreams''). But all these pale beside the peak moments: In affirmation of Joseph Campbell's assertion that people are not after the meaning of life so much as evidence that they are alive, O'Neill reflects on a showdown with his two-and-a-half- year-old daughter: ``I had raced through the wardrobe of emotionsaffection, gratitude, rage, fear, hope, delight, and hilaritywithin the time it takes to boil an egg. I was alive, all right.'' This is Cosby and Bombeck territory, but O'Neill makes his own mark with a more intellectual spin to his humor and more forthright emotionalism. He overreaches a bit at times, but in general he offers literate, insightful, and amusing companionship to Nineties parentsespecially fathersliving the intensely examined domestic life.