Fry’s whereabouts remain vague: his agent says he’s “abroad.” His doctor certified his “clinical depression,” which may help if the play’s producers sue. His friends say he’s lonely (he confessed his celibacy in a 1985 essay) and overworked: since finishing his second novel and a role in the American film “I.Q.,” he’s been doing his weekly BBC comedy show and writing two screenplays. Wherever he is, he’s surely trying, as he said in his fax, “to rethink my life … It would be foolish to carry on doing things for which I haven’t either the aptitude or perhaps the desire.” That doesn’t narrow the driven, multi-talented Fry’s options much. “If he decides to be an actor,” comedian Harry Enfield wrote in a London newspaper, “I hope he writes films for himself, the real him, not the exaggerated him he’s slipped into for us on television. If he writes books, I hope he . . . becomes the modern Wilde he deserves to be.”
Fry’s new novel, The Hippopotamus (292 pages. Random House. $22), a British best seller, makes us think be should follow Oscar and let the Oscars go. At his best, Fry suggests Wilde’s transcendant flippancy, Evelyn Waugh’s waspishness and the sunny absurdity of Jeeves’s creator, P.G. Wodehouse. (At his worst he either goes solemn as in the book’s ickily upbeat ending–or finds flatulence irresistibly comic.) … the Hippopotamus," in fact, could be a Wodehouse plot-a boozy ex-poet at a country house where the host’s teenage son appears to have mystic healing powers until you hit the smut. On about page one. And when Fry’s over-the-hill hero yearns for a young woman with “breasts that stand up like begging dogs,” we sense the possibilities of Wodehousian surrealism in an age of indecency Sounds like a good career choice to us. But what do critics know?
