NONFICTION - Nov. 1, 1992

THE GOOD SAMARITAN STRIKES AGAIN by Patrick McManus (Henry Holt: $17.95; 211 pp.) What can I tell you about humorist Patrick McManus? How about that Garrison Keillor seems a cosmopolitan city boy by comparison. Does that help you get a sense of what he thinks is funny? McManus is a good old boy Everyman--the anonymous Good Samaritan who helps an accident victim, or tries to, since his incredible bungling almost gets the survivor of a car crash compressed into a rectangle of sheet metal. He’s the guy with the theory about the worry box, how each one of us has a limit, and how his particular devils have to do with the disappearing checkbook (present) and performance anxiety when it comes to fishing (past). This set of essays is a rolling, gentle journey through a rural comic’s mind--no manic HBO special rat-a-tat delivery for him, thank you very much. He’s got a wife named Bun, an adolescence complete with a do-or-die football game, none of it particularly remarkable, some of it droll. A smattering of out-and-out laughs, but McManus truly doesn’t seem like he’s after the guffaw. It would be too noisy. It would disrupt his rhythm. Can you slow down from your car-phoning, fax-sending pace and enjoy this one? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s an emphatically different time zone.