Books: Old Rut, New Pilgrim

YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW by David Benedictus. 187 pages. Dution. $3.95.

The pilgrimage from innocence to experience, or from the provinces to the city or from despair to salvation, is one of the more thoroughly traveled, heavily rutted highways of English fiction. John Bunyan drew up the road map—the Slough of Despond, the Valley of Humiliation, Doubting Castle—but British Novelist David Benedictus' second book is far from Bunyanesque. At its zany best it is more reminiscent of the wonderfully erratic pilgrimage to London of young Sam Bennet in Dylan Thomas' Adventures in the...