The cover of Fool, best-selling author Christopher Moore's latest effort, warns prospective readers of the vagaries contained therein, including shagging, split infinitives and "the odd wank." From the beginning, this overly coy warning for the benefit of our virginally pure minds did not bode well.Now I read 2003's Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings, one of Moore's most acclaimed works, which follows marine biologist Nate Quinn through a surreal whale of an adventure. And I loved it. Fluke was hilarious. Fluke was deliciously outlandish. Fluke had its ribaldry, but every bit of it was tempered with wit and accurate descriptions that make readers snort with laughter in embarrassingly public situations. If Fool were anything like Fluke, the sheer hilarity of it would gloss over every vulgar episode thrown the reader's way. But as it turns out, Fool is not so much punctuated by the odd wank as it is a continuing spurt of vaguely Shakespearean masturbatory fiction.

In this parody of King Lear, we follow the fool, Pocket, who, we are all too quickly informed, is short of stature but large in areas Pocket seems to find more important. Accompanied by his enormous and perpetually horny apprentice, Drool, Pocket shags and swaggers his way around the set of Lear's rapidly disintegrating kingdom, alternately tossing around banter and sinking into introspection that will hopefully convince us of the perceptiveness hiding beneath his priapism. Unfortunately, the constant stream of sex (both consensual and otherwise) and varieties of crude descriptions thereof are only distractions from what are, truth be told, not Moore's most insightful witticisms. Early on in Fool, we learn from Pocket that "Life is loneliness, broken only by the gods taunting us with friendship and the odd bonk." This sage observation is about as good as it gets. Furthermore, combining flowery, tongue-in-cheek Shakespearean description with tired modernisms like "whatever" grows old before it's begun, and no number of retellings of Pocket's latest conquest of Goneril will save it.

And then there are the footnotes. Rather than hearkening to the pun-stuffed works of fantasy humorist Terry Pratchett or the addenda of the late, great footnote master David Foster Wallace, Moore's footnotes are almost purely didactic. An author attempting an incisive sendup of Shakespeare apparently cannot trust his readers to know what a dirk is, or, in the event that the reader is curious, to break out ye olde dictionary. Plus, the smattering of anachronistic terms amid the archaicisms Moore wishes were obscure makes the clunky footnotes all the more frustrating.

None of this is to say that the flamboyantly foul cannot also be flagrantly fun. T.C. Boyle's Water Music is as vulgar and as grossly sexual, but has a more persistent undercurrent of sardonic desperation. Everything ever penned by the depraved Irvine Welsh is gritty, crude and brilliant. And Fool has its moments of priapic hilarity. Fool just misses joining its ilk on that fine line between entertainingly vulgar and just repugnant. Moore would have done well to decrease the general ejaculation frequency (I counted, and the sum was positively Portnoy-esque) and Pocket's repetition of archaic words describing the not-so-tender act of love ("bonk," "shag," and, yes, even the F-word lose their shock value more quickly than Lear loses his mind). He could have replaced them with what were to me the bright spots of the book, the jabs at religion, politics and other dignified pursuits. The requisite three witches are named Parsley, Sage and Rosemary, with a clever riposte available to those who ask about Thyme, and the Crusades get their own winking condemnation; unfortunately, japes of both sorts were constantly overshadowed by the much more dull potty humor.

The conclusion of Fool does achieve some sort of insight into Lear, with the fool becoming more complex and sympathetic and the king less sympathetic and more cruel. But in the end, Moore should leave the Shakespearean introspection to Tom Stoppard and return to a voice more his own.