Private Parts.

Private Parts Howard Stern Simon & Schuster, $23 By Scott Shuger People in book publishing are always complaining about how much material they have to wade through and how little of it is any good. Well, with the publication of this book, a 446-page attack of verbarrhea from morning radio man Howard Stern, it's going to get much worse. For anybody harboring any remaining doubts, Private Parts proves that in America today, anything can be a "book," and anyone can be an "author." Indeed, it proves that anyone can be the nation's No.1 best-selling "author." Yet another triumph of democracy over quality.

To be fair, Stern is sometimes funny. Referring to a right-wing group asking for donations for its effort to have him removed from the airwaves, Stern wonders, "Why are they raising money to force me off the air? Send the money directly to me, and if it's enough, I'll leave voluntarily." In an on-air discussion with Dick Cavett, Stern combined a reference to Cavett's up-and-now-mostly-down talk show career with one to Cavett's long battle against depression this way: "What's worse, Dick, when they cancel one of your shows or when they cancel one of your prescriptions?"

And, very occasionally, Stern is even funny when the topic might actually matter to someone. When Magic Johnson's announcement that he was HIV-positive was greeted with gushing reverence from the media, Stern had his own, more on-point take. Stern observed that

Magic had kept hundreds of women he'd slept with in the dark about the fatal risk they were taking. The book includes Stern's on-air, imaginary rendition of Magic's less-than-frank discussion with a former bed partner:

Magic: "You know what, baby, it would be a whole lot easier if you tuned in to national TV. Just tune in to my press conference."

Woman: "Okay, but that doesn't sound like good news."

Magic: "Look at it this way: You can smoke all the cigarettes you want, do lots of drugs, jump out of an airplane, and race cars."

"What I told my listeners," Stem writes, "was that Magic was pretty damn irresponsible to get it in the first place. It wasn't as if he got infected through a bad blood transfusion or from his dentist. No, this guy came down with it because he had incredible amounts of unprotected sex... Some role model! ... Meanwhile a real hero like Jonas Salk can't afford cable TV."

However, Stern's book contains remarkably few such moments. Far more typical is what he says about men who are against abortion: "I hope they, collectively, while walking down the street, get pulled into an alley, sprawled over a dumpster, and [expletive] right up their fat [expletive] asses. Then they'll be crying, |We got raped in the ass!' Good for you, you pigs. Then they'll be the ones screaming that they want to have abortions." (Excuse me, but does Stem think that men get pregnant?) And Simon & Schuster must be particularly proud of this sentence: "Her [expletive] must have smelled like daisies, I imagined as I clutched my hot beef."

The main problem is that while Simon & Schuster published Private Parts, it certainly didn't edit it. There's utterly no evidence of shaping or guidance. That's not exactly a bulletin to those who've been following the degeneration of non-fiction publishing over the past decade's worth of celeb bios and self-help titles; it's just the most blatant example yet. It's interesting to note that by far the funniest thing Howard Stem has ever done was his one appearance on "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno (recounted in the book). The reason is that, unlike morning radio and big-time publishing, on "The Tonight Show" there are things you can't say, and there was a delightful tension involved in watching Stern press against that limitation (the same point applies to Stern's many appearances on David Letterman). In short, Simon & Schuster forgot that you can't get edginess without supplying an edge.

The result is that Private Parts isn't about anything. Or to be more accurate, it's all about Howard Stem, and he isn't about anything. What's promising about Stem is that in this age of public relations, he's spontaneous, and in this age of pretense, he's plebeian. But as useful as these qualities are--and as much as America could use more of them--they are form, not substance. By themselves, they are neither valuable nor interesting. Lincoln was spontaneous and plain-spoken, but so was Dillinger.

What's next for America after a book like this? Well, I hear Simon & Schuster is thinking about opening up a chain of massage parlors. Scott Shuger is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly.