GOOD BYE, AVA, by Richard Bissell (241 pp.; Atlantic-Little, Brown; $3.95), recalls the widespread complaint that the U.S. lacks comic novelists. This is not true, as is proved weekly by the bestseller lists; the great lack is of novelists who are funny on purpose. In that lodge two of the more notable members are Peter De Vries (The Tents of Wickedness) and Richard Bissell (7½ Cents).
Bissell, in High Water and A Stretch on the River, has libeled the Mississippi more amusingly than anyone since Mark Twain, and Blue Rock, Iowa, the scene of his latest foolishness, is a river town. His...
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