THE PEDANT AND THE SHUFFLY

The funniest—perhaps the only genuinely funny—religious book of the past few years was St. Fidgeta and Other Parodies by Bellairs and Fitschen. Now, St. Fidgeta will have to move over and make room for a pedant (whose specialty is proving that his friends do not exist) and a neighbor's pet shuffly ("scuffulans hirsutus; they live in fens and eat Mayflies, bulrush hearts, and linen napkins"), who manage, in a very slender volume, to be the instruments by which being, and therefore all beings, are/is allegorized, fableized, and parodied to within an inch of its life. The authors' delightful nastiness makes one almost forgive the publisher for publishing in book form what is really a magazine piece of standard length.