TV star's hit and miss with slice-of-life vignettes

B.J. Novak is probably best known for his role as Ryan Howard, who started off as a temp in the paper supply company, Dunder Mifflin, in the American TV series The Office. The character rose through the ranks to management before suffering a downfall. Novak is also a writer, director and executive producer, with degrees in English and Spanish literature.

One More Thing is a collection of miscellaneous stories, characterised by a concoction of whimsy and humour. It's Novak's first book and at times there is a feeling that he's using it as a means of testing out untried material. Even the title sounds a bit like the tag-line of a stand-up comic throwing out a few morsels to see which ones qualify as superior laughter bait. Most of the stories are only a couple of pages long; others even less than that, with a few two-line efforts more throwaway quips than meaningful micro-fiction. On the whole though, the longer tales are the more successful.

The opening tale, The Rematch for instance, is very good. After the humiliating defeat to the tortoise in their historic foot-race, the hare fell into a depressive cycle: He "gained weight, then lost weight, turned to religion, then another less specific religion". But after having tried yoga, travelled the world and volunteered, the hare realised nothing could cure his moroseness except for a rematch. The results this time round? "Slow and steady wins the race, till truth and talent claim their place."

Novak likes putting his average Joes in absurd situations just to see how they cope. How indeed would one make small talk when on a date with a self-professed warlord? Occasionally, however, his characters do extraordinary things, like the man who wrote the most famous maths problem in all of America. In fact, quite a number of stories reveal Novak's playful inventiveness. His characters exist in a surreal plane where it's perfectly reasonable to have a rollercoaster ride designed to reflect life itself, a full-length mirror created to show earth in its entirety, a sex robot that's capable of expressing love and a school principal who decides to abolish arithmetic from the curriculum.

One More Thing is an enjoyable collection, but would have been stronger had it been trimmed of some of the more bitsy pieces that are too insubstantial to elicit anything more than a quick snigger.