Monster in a Box.

IN 1984, the wispy monologist Spalding Gray landed a small part in The Killing Fields, the Roland Joffe film that can still occasionally be seen on Ted Turner's Khmer Rouge Cable Channel. Over the next couple of years, Gray repackaged his movie-making experiences into a monologue, which became the entertaining 1987 film Swimming to Cambodia. Gray spent the next four years writing a totally unreadable, 1,900-page novel, Impossible Vacation, which Knopf has since trimmed down to a readable but totally unnecessary novel of the same name (228 pp., $22). Simultaneously, Gray has repackaged the experiences he had while writing his unreadable novel into an entertaining film called Monster in a Box. This would seem to suggest that four or five years down the road, he will repackage his experiences while composing an unlistenable opera or choreographing an unwatchable ballet into an entertaining film called Think Tank of the Gods or Slouching toward Martha's Vineyard. This guy has a great, great job.

As a monologist, Gray is the third and, some might say, the brightest star in a very tiny constellation, which includes Eric Bogosian and Garrison Keillor. (Monologists, for those unfamiliar with the art form, are stand-up comics who have read R.D. Laing.) Unlike the angry not-so-young-man Bogosian or the gnomish rustic Keillor, Gray is a standard-issue neurotic, of a type New Yorkers will easily recognize, since everyone in New York either is or has lived next door to Spalding Gray. With his flowing mane of unstylish grey hair and his tidy lumberjack shirts (I didn't know Ralph Lauren made Great Northern Woodsmen Shirts in extra-extra-small), Gray has been described as a WASP Woody Allen. This description is appropriate, in that Gray, like Allen, is dissatisfied with being a talented comic; he also feels a need to display his brooding, serious side, even if this means tying both his hands behind his back, artistically speaking, by writing material that isn't funny. In this sense, Impossible Vacation is Spalding Gray's Interiors. Only not as awful.

It is not necessary to have read Impossible Vacation in order to enjoy Monster in a Box, just as it is not necessary to have seen the Cleveland Indians play in order to enjoy jokes about the Cleveland Indians. Like all contemporary American novels, Impossible Vacation is a thinly veiled autobiographical account of a fortyish intellectual's inability to cope with the fact that his parents ruined his life. Like all contemporary American novels, Impossible Vacation showcases an insane mother and an absent father, and has tons of stuff about drugs, booze, sex, and the Sixties. Like all contemporary American novels, Impossible Vacation includes mind-bogglingly bad sentences such as: "On the other side of her rage, I found a calm center that I could be quiet with."

Happily, Monster in a Box has none of the failings of Impossible Vacation. The elfin monologist sits at a table on a darkened stage in front of a barely visible audience, and does his schtick for an hour and a half. On the table is his pre-Knopfized, 1,900-page manuscript; he also has a few other props such as a microphone. The film starts slowly, as Gray runs through his unsuccessful attempts to write his novel at a famous artists' colony in New England, but it picks up steam once the narrative shifts to the West Coast. Gray informs us that he only wanted to work in the movie business because of the fabulous health insurance. He then careens off into a funny riff about being hired by a cable network to find and interview residents of L.A. who are not working on screenplays. Next, he is hired by a film studio to fly to Nicaragua and check out the Sandinista revolution. He finds himself in the company of left-wing dentists and academics so bursting with piety that he is convinced the plane cannot crash: because earnestness alone would keep it aloft.

The Sandinista set piece gives way to an overly long monologue about Gray's fear that he has contracted AIDS through a fleeting liaison with a Stage Door Judy. Because the Monster in a Box has now grown to gargantuan proportions, his therapist recommends that he come in for three sessions a week. The therapy routine-Son of Woody Allen material--also goes on too long, but Gray regains his stride when he describes his experiences at a film festival in Leningrad at which he found himself answering the question, posed by a solemn Soviet film buff: "Why did Dustin Hoffman take that role in Tootsie?" Shortly after a lumbering final routine about receiving dismal reviews for his performance in a revival of Our Town, the movie ends.

A man who gets up on a darkened stage and tells mildly entertaining stories about his neuroses for an hour and a half is wise to call himself a "performing artist" or an "avant-garde actor" or a "monologist" because that way his talents will be compared only to those of his fellow performing artists, avant-garde actors, and monologists. But the appropriate comparison really is with stand-up comics, who can be just as literate, sophisticated, and intelligent as any of our Bogosianics. When this comparison is made, the results are not as favorable. Gray's audience is the serial chuckler rather than the belly-laugher; the Swimmer to Cambodia does not have the talent or the material to seize an audience by the throat the way Richard Pryor or Robin Williams can, and he is nowhere near as funny as the young Woody Allen or even the young Eddie Murphy. He is NPR's idea of what a comic should be: a Bob Newhart who has been to Europe. It's hard to see what all the fuss is about.

Mr. Queenan is author of the forthcoming Imperial Caddy, a biography of Dan Quayle.