T A B L E+T A L K Which sentences do you wish you had written? Spell them out in the Books area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Now It's Time to Say Goodbye By Dale Peck Fiction (05/29/98) The Treatment By Daniel Menaker Fiction (05/28/98) The Overspent American By Juliet B. Schor Nonfiction (05/27/98) I Know This Much Is True By Wally Lamb Fiction (05/26/98) Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing By Ved Mehta Nonfiction (05/22/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SEARCH REVIEWS BY: title of book author publisher reviewer F E A T U R E Punch drunk By Vivian Gornick Norman Mailer's collected essays reveal the sad legacy of a writer who couldn't stop fighting (05/27/98)		___________be sweet _____[ A CONDITIONAL LOVE STORY ] BY ROY BLOUNT JR. KNOPF NONFICTION 290 PAGES BY KATHARINE WHITTEMORE | When Robert Benchley's brother died in childhood, he overheard his stricken mother wailing, "Why couldn't it have been Robert?" When Mark Twain was a boy, he peered through a keyhole and saw his own father being autopsied. If an early trauma makes one grow up to be a humorist, what's Roy Blount Jr.'s excuse? In a word: Mom. She was a humdinger, a suffocating malcontent, an orphan herself who assumed everyone would abandon her, including her children. As her talented Georgian progeny writes: "Why have I pursued humor to such an absurd extent -- to the point of vocation -- if not because I grew up desperately wishing I could do something to keep my mother from being so sad and angry?" "Be Sweet" is a mother-centered semi-memoir that is by turns enlightening and maddening. I'll dispense with the irritations first: the prose shaggy-dogs all over the place, with many digressions falling flat (there's a weak set piece where Blount tells jokes from the perspective of his infant self). And the name-dropping gets to you. We learn that Billy Martin thought Blount was Mickey Mantle on the phone, and Blount crows how he once made the poet John Ashbery "crack up." But the hardest stuff to take is the way the twice-divorced Blount limns the women in his life. You don't get a sense of either of his wives, for one thing. He stews in generalities, and it's creepy, it's self-absorbed. "Women are always right when feelings are involved, and feelings are always involved as soon as a woman sets foot in the room," he bites. Males withhold, he adds. They "hang back from calling on the phone, from chatting at breakfast, from saying 'I love you' between anniversaries." Really? I don't buy it, and if this is true of Blount -- who is supremely verbal and clearly unhappy -- then two words come to mind: 1) Get 2) Therapy. I admire Blount's work. If you can push past the misogyny, his book has real moments. The chapter on being a Jr. shines. His love for his own kids and grandsons is touching. He can be rippingly funny and has a gift for the right phrase. Georgia dirt, for instance, is "sweet potato-colored." Baseball player Eddie Mathews had a voice that "sounded like a backhoe scooping riprap." This son realizes that his career -- which we learn much about -- springs from the ungrantable wish to heal his mother, plus the fact that she was a real wordsmith herself. "My mom loved me to pieces," Blount admits. "And I'm still trying to put them together." SALON | June 1, 1998 Katharine Whittemore is the editor of American Movie Classics magazine. Discuss your favorite Southern writers in the Books area of Table Talk.