The View from Chivo

NYT, 1971
Cunningly disguised as a novel, “The View From Chivo” is a free-floating sample of an increasingly rare literary species: humor. It is a skimming of the froth of the richest comic imagination bubbling in West Texas, where H. Allen Smith now lives, as well as Mt. Kisco, where he used to live. (There's nobody funnier in between these two geographic points either, to my knowledge.)
He who would analyze a Smith book (to paraphrase Wordsworth) is akin to one who would botanize upon his mother's grave—but, to establish general boundaries, it deals with Tiger, the son of Rhubarb, a cat who is the richest feline in the world. Tiger's owners take him on an aborted trip to Japan, where plans are afoot to establish a chain of geisha houses.
Also aboard is Pichini, a horse who high-jumps like a man, only higher, and King Halekawatha, who wants to introduce pollutants on his Polynesian island. Why does the S. S. Thaddeus return to port? What do they call a nervous breakdown in Aviente, Tex.? And what exactly happened at the First Annual Tumbleweed Festival? For the answers to these questions, and for other associated ribaldry, you'll have to look into “The View From Chivo.”