"The Funnies," by J. Robert Lennon. Riverhead Books. 301 pages. $23.95.

Tim Mix's father has died and has left him no money, although he left money to everyone else. What he has left him is the chance to inherit a comic strip, if he can learn to draw it in a month, to the satisfaction of the syndicate. Tim Mix is trying, under the tutelage of an old, failed cartoonist who drills him mercilessly.

Mix's father made a fortune drawing a horrid strip, so closely modeled on the "Family Circus" it raises the mnemonic hair on the back of anyone's neck. The same stale jokes, nauseatingly sweetsy gags, dumbkopf puns, idiotic kid humor in the Keane comic are found in the Mix feature, called "Family Funnies."

To the outside world, "Family Funnies," in all its wholesome vapidity, is modeled on the Mix family. For Tim Mix there is nothing funny about his family. He doesn't want to be a newspaper cartoonist. On the other hand, he is broke, and detects in his father's misanthropic will some sort of rough trade wisdom.

The task of becoming a cartoonist is harder than he ever imagined, and takes him from his chosen field of found-object sculpture, which so far, no one wants to buy. He forces himself to try to think up kiddie jokes, such as: "Bobby likes strawberries, Bitty likes blueberries, but Lindy likes liberries!" This delivered with one of the kids surrounded with books. The crisp, unarguable stupidity of this delighted me.

The comic strip family does not resemble Mix's real family, and the heritage grows more distant with additional discoveries, and a few mysteries that are fun to decipher. He is left wondering is there anything funny about families? On the comic strip surface of things, maybe. Underneath, things are awful.

But Lennon's writing, following the path of his successful and nuanced first novel, "The Light of Falling Stars," published in 1997, is smooth and knowing. He has the small world of newspaper comic strips down cold, from the syndicate to the editors, the entire process that separates the good stuff from the garbage and makes sure the garbage gets printed. Against his own best judgment, Tim Mix is swept up in this tiny world, this highly organized dimwittedness, where the infighting is so vicious because the stakes are so pointless.

The supposition, which is scarcely ever questioned closely, is that the comics somehow reflect real American life, but of course they don't.

Family Circus, which is one of the most widely syndicated panels, is a masterpiece of nothingness, neither wise, funny, incisive, threatening, accurate, or well-drawn, and all of this seems to be fine with the papers that run it. Lennon's novel circulates around this subtle point. Does anyone care what happens to the American family, or are they content to accept the dopey version, presented just below consciousness?

There are no rules for being parents, and the hellish experience of most families can only be borne by ignoring reality and pretending that cuteness rules the day. Lennon comes at this problem through an oblique devise, but finally makes an important argument about the unstructured, and unexpected, nature of love.

Jeff Danziger has written for the New York Daily News, the Christian Science Monitor and is a political cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. Danziger wrote "Rising Like the Tucson," and a children's book, "The Champlain Monster."

Pub Date: 03/07/99