The Paris Review salad days wilt with time.

The Paris Review Book By the editors of the Paris Review With an introduction by George Plimpton Picador, 521 pages, $30.00 The Paris Review "has been around for a long time," as George Plimpton says in his introduction. And, as he does not say, the magazine has seen better days. But when you finish this huge, dull collection of high-minded writing, you begin to doubt that even its better days were all that great. The great names are all there, but with a few exceptions, the selections from their works are pompous and bland. In short, the mid-century, upper-middlebrow writing that defined the Paris Review has not aged well.

The anthology begins badly, with a bluff letter from William Styron foolishly asserting that Jim Jones and Norman Mailer (and, by implication, Styron himself) bear serious comparison with Melville. Styron must have written this bluster long ago, in the magazine's glory days (he describes Mailer and Jones as "young men"). It's been a long time since he made this vainglorious claim, and the verdict is in: Most of those promising young men grew old and produced little of value.

Many of the names in the Preppie Pantheon represented here hardly deserve to be called writers at all. Why, for example, is Truman Capote still taken seriously? The man wrote one decent true-crime novel and nothing else even readable, let alone praiseworthy. Yet Plimpton includes worshipful Paris Review interviews with Capote and other, equally dismal mid-century figures like Susan Sontag and Paul Bowles. These figures gained their fame by peddling a cosmopolitan perspective to the insular, timid mid-century America. Now that every middleclass kid has done the Grand Tour, and literally millions of undergraduates have sampled Theory, it's difficult to imagine how Sontag and Bowles could interest anyone.

As striking as the adulation for unworthy writers is the absence of American writers who do the same sort of thing far better. Hundreds of pages of the anthology are devoted to mainstream fiction about travel and domestic griefs, but the preeminent American writer of this genre, Charles Portis, is never mentioned. Instead there's the usual bathos by Toni Morrison and Heather McHugh (her poem's title, "Intensive Care," tells you all you need to know).

It struck me, as I read these solemn, workshoppy stories of serial monogamy, that the very best examination of American life among the wealthy of the Eastern Seaboard (the core audience of the Paris Review) was written by a Russian: Edward Limonov's superb memoir, His Butler's Story. Of course it would be absurd to imagine that the Paris Review would publish Limonov. Their taste in Russians runs to that grand bore, Joseph Brodsky, and their view of the Slavic world is summed up in another piece of bathos, Nicholas Christopher's "Terminus."

They're all very solemn, these writers?above all those in the section titled "Whimsy." In this context, "whimsy" seems to mean "?as opposed to funny." There's one of those campy Edward Gorey tales with the cute little engravings, and a transcript of a seance with Stein and Toklas by James Merrill and David Jackson, in which the well-connected shades speak uncannily like?James Merrill and David Jackson.

Some of Merrill's seance sessions are very good, funny and even uncanny. But the anthology always chooses the dullest and most "serious" writing of great comic writers. Frank O'Hara, for example, is represented by an uncharacteristically grim poem, "Pearl Harbor," and Kenneth Koch by "To the French Language"?chosen, perhaps, for the Parisian connection, but definitely not one of Koch's funnier poems. In all this grand seriousness, moments of comedy or just honesty are precious. My favorite is an interview with Hunter S. Thompson, in which the unnamed interviewer timidly questions him about the relation between writing and "?drinking and so forth." (I love that queasy phrase, "?and so forth"!) Thompson, cutting through the euphemisms easily, describes his preferred writing drugs. The interviewer, clearly shocked, initiates an exchange that shows Thompson at his finest:

Interviewer: Almost without exception writers we've interviewed over the years admit they cannot write under the influence of booze or drugs?or at the least what they've done has to be rewritten in the cool of the day. What's your comment about this?

Thompson: They lie. Or maybe you've been interviewing a very narrow spectrum of writers? Did you interview Coleridge? Did you interview Poe?? Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation? A bunch of stone-sober clerics?

I think that two-word sentence, "They lie," is the finest thing in the whole anthology. By the time I reached the interview with Thompson (on p. 321), I had that guilty, depressed feeling I always get when reading the writers we're told to admire?many of whom are included in this anthology. Rereading them for this review, I wished I'd had more confidence in that wise, unheeded aversion.