NONFICTION - May 21, 1995

THE AFTERLIFE DIET by Daniel Pinkwater (Random House: $21; 259 pp.). Black comedy has two requirements: it should bite, and it should amuse. Daniel Pinkwater’s “The Afterlife Diet” fails on both counts, unfortunately, its humor being much too strained and its ironies either banal or senseless. You might guess as much from the book’s premise: Milton Cramer, an inconsequential book editor, wakes up to find that he’s dead. Milton soon discovers that dead people are segregated in the afterlife, and that his Heaven--since Milton is fat and Jewish--is a Catskill resort populated by similarly overweight Jews. Most of Milton’s new acquaintances are obsessed with their weight, and one of them, would-be writer Milo Levi-Nathan, slips Milton a fourth-rate sci-fi manuscript, which the editor immediately misplaces. It’s no great loss--though Pinkwater doesn’t spare us Milo’s dreadful prose, excerpting midway in this novel sections from three of the character’s works-in-progress. By this point it’s obvious that “The Afterlife Diet” isn’t going anywhere, that Pinkwater--NPR commentator and children’s book writer--hasn’t learned how to sustain a book-length plot or to distinguish the comical from the silly. If Pinkwater had developed his most promising theme--Milo’s immersion in an exploitative self-help book publishing empire after deciding to formulate his own diet book--”The Afterlife Diet” might have kept the reader’s interest, but as it is we’re stuck with seemingly endless scenes of borscht-belt kvetching, psychoanalysis that takes place in a delicatessen, and tales of Eastern European “Wereakeets” (vampire parakeets). And in case you’re wondering, Pinkwater--good thing he’s Jewish--does manage to shoehorn the Holocaust into this novel, in the form of diet created by a one-time Nazi doctor convinced, because some concentration-camp inmates survived, that “maximal thinness is the sovereign key to good health.” No, it’s called the Afrika Corps Diet, not the Death Camp Diet . . . but with either name, this is funny?