Steven Wright: the story of a boy whose first words were “Your witness.”

The joy of Steven Wright is that life is a non sequitur. No two thoughts are ever connected. You never know what he will say next, other than it will have nothing to do with what he has already said. So when Steven Wright writes a novel, it would just have to be out there. And so it is, in Harold, Steven Wright’s first novel.

Harold is a seven year old third grader with a tremendously independent, unfettered and fertile imagination. (As an infant, his first words were “Your witness.”) In his daily boredom at school, he daydreams. He is the vehicle for a Grand Canyon full of one liners and out there concepts that are the stock in trade of Steven Wright.

There is a neat gimmick to deliver all these disparate concepts. Harold has a rectangular frame in his brain, and birds of all stripe from the common to the extinct to the made up, fly through it. That is the cue for a new thought to get himself out of whatever corner he has painted himself into. It works very well, helping to keep the pace dancing. He identifies each bird, but one time “A bird flew through the rectangle so quickly it cannot be described. Like everybody’s life.”

The scene is 1961 Massachusetts. Wright tries to bring to life the pop culture of the era, but he seems to bristle at the limitations Harold…