Book Review : Further Adventures of Me, Myself and I : MORNING, NOON AND NIGHT; by Spalding Gray; Farrar, Straus & Giroux $18, 152 pages

Spalding Gray is so interested in himself he assumes you will be too. That is the premise of his career as a monologuist on stage and in a series of books that might as well be labeled “All About Me.”

Not everyone will share Gray’s assumption that he is both interesting and important, but we live in an age of self-revelation about the personal things that people do, and his stage monologues and books have found a receptive audience.

“Morning, Noon and Night,” which Gray presented as a work in progress at UCLA’s Schoenberg Auditorium in April, is a true tale of the domestic happenings in the Gray household on one day in October 1997 and features his girlfriend Kathie; his 9-month-old son Theo; their son, Forrest, then 5; and Kathie’s daughter, Melissa, then 11.

Gray’s success has brought them from Manhattan, where for 30 years he lived the typical angst-ridden life of a nervous New York would-be intellectual, to Sag Harbor, Long Island, a quaint place that was once a whaling town and is now a mix of working people and high-toned exiles from the big city.

Gray can scarcely believe his good luck, it seems. He rides his bike into town and revels in the huge number of American flags that fly every day. He rides to the bridge and gazes fondly at his own sailboat moored there, a 15-foot gaff-rigged catboat. He goes to the five-and-dime and buys stuff.

Sometimes he and Forrest take walks, and Forrest asks little-boy questions like, “How do flies celebrate?”

Gray, for the most part, tells us how wonderful fatherhood is. That is something all fathers know, but most fathers are sentient enough to realize that other fathers know it too. Not Gray. He is so self-absorbed that it seems never to occur to him that what he finds stupendously wonderful other men might find so obvious that it’s trite to hear.

Or even embarrassing. But the embarrassment factor, the reader finds, is not at work in Gray. Perhaps that’s because he is accustomed to being on stage, where the embarrassment of each member of the audience is covered by the embarrassed laughter of the whole. You have no such cover when you sit alone with Gray’s new book. It’s just you and him, and you find yourself wishing he wouldn’t do what he is doing, like making frequent fart jokes or belittling the precociousness of his stepdaughter.

Just as he has no compunction about telling you the least thought that enters his head, so too he has no compunction about putting the people in his life, from his wife to the children, into his book. You have to wonder what the children will think when they grow up and read what this man has done with their private lives.

It’s not that Gray is a complicated person. He has been called a typical neurotic New Yorker, like Woody Allen. But Allen is complex, a genius of filmmaking. Gray is just a guy who loves to yak about himself.

He yaks about how wonderful it is to live in a house built in 1890 with a living room that is 35-by-25 feet, about how nifty it is to wake up and see the rising sun illuminate the 1770 church across the street, how great it is to have children’s plastic toys floating in the bottom of the shower.

Much of it is harmless enough, but it is certainly not consequential or engaging.

In keeping with his newfound appreciation for the joys of fatherhood in later life, Gray does treat us to Great Thoughts Upon Death. He frets to be reminded that We All Die, and broods about the endless extinction to come. But he brings neither arresting thoughts nor special feeling to this common condition. He quotes the moving, famous Vermont gravestone inscription--”It is a fearful thing to love what Death can touch”--but, carelessly and irritatingly, gets it wrong, eliding the austere “It is . . .” to a vulgarly anachronistic “It’s . . .”

Careless and vulgar, those words pretty well sum up the impression Gray leaves with “Morning, Noon and Night.” He is careless of the feelings of the people around him and vulgar in his sub-teenage sense of a good joke. All in all, Gray’s not a bad fellow--you only wish he wouldn’t talk so much about himself.