Life, the Universe and Everything

Douglas Adams's Life, the Universe and Everything, the third installment in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, finds Arthur Dent dragged out of his prehistoric exile on Earth and back into a cosmic mess of absurd proportions. This time the threat is Krikkit, a planet of xenophobic inhabitants who, upon discovering they are not alone in the universe, decide the only reasonable response is to destroy everything else in it. Adams weaves together flying parties, sentient mattresses, the spectacularly rude Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, and a plot device involving an Ashes cricket match that somehow makes perfect nonsensical sense by the end. The novel feels more conventionally plotted than its predecessors, with a clearer narrative arc and stakes, though it loses none of the genre-skewering wit that made the earlier books so beloved.

What makes the book work is Adams's gift for burying genuine philosophical weight inside throwaway jokes. The Krikkitmen's horror at the existence of other beings is played for laughs, but it's also a sly meditation on parochialism and the violence of small worldviews suddenly confronted with bigness. Arthur remains a wonderfully ordinary anchor amid the chaos, and his unexpected mastery of flight (achieved, naturally, by being distracted at the critical moment of falling) is one of the series' most charming set pieces. The novel sags slightly in places where Adams seems more interested in his jokes than his characters, and readers new to the series will be hopelessly lost, but for anyone already in love with this universe, it's a delightful, melancholy, frequently brilliant continuation. Not quite the equal of the first two books, but still funnier and stranger than almost anything else on the shelf.