BOOKS: IS EXCESS NECESSARY?

JAMES THURBER: HIS LIFE AND TIMES BY Harrison Kinney (Holt; $40) was scheduled to come out late last year. But the publisher postponed the date to give reviewers a chance to finish all 1,238 pages. A wise move, but not as effective as editing this mountain of repetition, trivia and undigested research would have been.

Yet blowsy as it is, this biography of the great American humorist has some appeal. Begun as an undergraduate thesis in 1948, it has been the avocation of a lifetime for Kinney, who is a free-lance writer. His children, now grown and gone, have lived with it all their lives. Parodying the Thurber memoir, The Years with Ross, they told their father that he should call his effort The Years with Thurber. The writing radiates the author's affection for his subject and a poignant willingness to take up the cudgels against any claim that Twain was Thurber's superior.

If truly outsize, especially since Thurber's life was not very eventful, the book is hardly a literary curiosity. Reading it exposes in large type the problem with many biographies in recent years: a refusal to use editorial judgment to assess the relative worth of research. The first part of the book describes in separate chapters the important people in Thurber's early life: family, teachers, bosses and, yes, his dogs. Later the same method is used about the New Yorker years. As the cast expands, each previous character is reintroduced. The repetition is remorseless. Further, paragraphs of quotations--from letters, interviews, journals--are laid end to end, and most aren't even from Thurber.

Conclusions about the man--the nature of his humor, his struggles with blindness and depression, his possible misogyny--are rare in this compendium. What is there is the material on which to base them. Perhaps it should have been called The Thurber Files.

--By Martha Duffy