The Human Country is an oddly pedestrian title for a new collection of stories that showcases Mathews prodigious and delicious gifts in exquisite miniature. At story length his accomplishments as a stylist shine forth with particular force, but with no diminution of inventiveness; his boldest flights of imagination are anchored in a nut-ball precision of detail. (In one story a fish needed for a recipe must be "lured to the surface with a skein of tiny beads that resemble the larvae on which it preys, then bludgeoned with an underwater boomerang.") He is also capable of sentences of rare delicacy and beauty. In "Their Words, for You," a kind of prose villanelle, we come upon the following: "The clouds came early, little at first, a few silver birds that grew into dogs and horses and parted to be new things, mighty things spoiling for a storm"—an image worthy of William Carlos Williams.

A couple of the best stories in the collection offer paradoxical situations that suggest Borges on laughing gas, particularly "The Dialect of the Tribe." One of those cracked scholars indigenous to the metafictional world delivers a paper on a New Guinea tribe that speaks Pagolak, a language susceptible to "translations that foreign listeners could understand and accept" while "conceal[ing] from them the original meaning of every statement made." Naturally this tribe's primitive intuition of the principles of poststructuralism drives the speaker mad. The theme of language as a set of arbitrarily assigned meanings that may or may not be shared and in fact may be unknowable also informs "Remarks of the Scholar Graduate." Mathews concocts burlesques and parodies of such rare excellence as to put one in mind of the broad literary japery of Terry Southern at his most inspired. "Tradition and the Individual Talent: The 'Bratislava Spiccato'" is a fine shaggy-dog story that is also a delicious send-up of the pretentious liner notes of classical recordings, while "The Novel as History" apes the garrulousness and self-importance of the Conradian narrator. Mathews is, among other things, a master of that now lamentably neglected '60s art form, the put-on.

The central section of the book, "The American Experience: Stories to Be Read Aloud," consists of more elusive experiments in voice and imagery. "The Way Home" is in part Mathews's ars poetica and statement on how imagination works on the sensible world and in part an evocation of a Prufrockian, detached character. "Tear Sheet" offers a startling vision of philanthropic brightness, sunshine piped in by fiber-optic cable to the dark corners of an American city, while "Franz Kafka in Riga" reads like Borges's "Pierre Menard" put into a compactor. The final section, "Calibrations of Latitude," comprises ten previously uncollected stories, a mixed bag that includes the most explicitly Oulipian entry in the book, "Clocking the World on Cue." It is based on the principle of the chronogram, a literary form in which the sum of the letters that double as Roman numerals (c, d, i, l, m, v, and x) used in the piece add up to a particular number; in this "Chronogram for 2001," both the title and the piece itself add up to that year in the calendar, as Mathews offers an orthographically adept survey of global New Year's Eve activities. One senses the workings of Oulipian underpinnings quite strongly in several others, and it is tantalizing not to know the conditions imposed on their composition. But Oulipians would say that the point of the exercise is not the ingenuity of the solution but rather the effect it achieves on the reader.

There remains one other aspect of Harry Mathews's work that seems particularly French and that sets him apart from his American literary cohort: a lyrical capacity for passion and beauty. His third novel, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1975), is an epistolary novel between two newlyweds, a librarian in Miami and his wife, Twang, a Southeast Asian whose letters are written in a hilarious and slowly evolving pidgin English. The plot, as usual, hinges on an elaborate and rococo quest, but in her final missive, Twang's developing facility has brought her to this passionate address: "My mind is so full, so full of you, Zachary! It swells in this goodness all of love over the world, then to the north, now I see some lightning of first summer warmths, and it's as I shall feel of you when first I see you distant, still faceless; and south, there are I believe shells on the beach and I remember that never will you collect them, I'll be a shell you can just walk on my uncollected skull if that be your pleasure; and east, the sun, the golden sword of new life!" The residual awkwardness of the language only highlights the strength of the sentiment; Edmund White quite correctly cites this novel as one of Mathews's most successful marriages of astonishing cleverness with genuine feeling.

The Human Country is unlikely on its own to ignite a Harry Mathews revival, as desirable as such a development would be. But the example of his work, so full of Wildean play and Continental insouciance and all-American ingenuity, could only be salutary for a literary culture all but clogged at the moment by careerism and the effluvia of the Self. The theme of the current McSweeney's is hoaxes, and it is chockablock with artifacts from a variety of authors concerned with false documents, fabricated memories, imaginary artworks, and literary pranks. The execution is uneven and sometimes marred by the smirky feyness that the magazine occasionally succumbs to, but the spirit of the enterprise is so lively and amusing that Mathews would feel right at home. It is spooky for me to have say it, but the experimental postmodernism of my passionately committed youthful reading is fading into historical memory, which offers a compelling reason for younger writers and readers especially to discover the work of Harry Mathews, its blithest spirit, while he's still around to teach the young dogs some terrific old tricks.