Mark Helprin's Freddy and Fredericka is a sort of shaggy dog story that's as enthusiastic and eager to please as a puppy, and often as relentless and wearying as one, too.

Along with his customary lyrical prose flights, Helprin packs his farcical novel wall-to-wall with willfully zany adventures, classic slapstick, verbal vaudeville and broad satire, nearly begging the poor reader to have a good time. Though this rollicking book truly does charm for short stretches, the party goes on a bit too long, bogging down with repetitive gags and causing the emotional connection with the titular heroes to slip away.

Helprin's previous novels, A Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War and Memoir from Antproof Case, were all released to widespread acclaim. This time, the praise is bound to be less effusive.

In this new story, the prince and princess of Wales, Freddy and Fredericka - essentially a Bizarro World equivalent of Charles and Diana - suffer from specialized forms of ignorance and ineptitude, the kind that only a long life of privilege and seclusion seems to bestow.

Therefore, they are ill-prepared when Freddy's parents draw upon an obscure royal tradition meant to test the mettle of "marginal Kings" and exile the pair to the United States with the goal of reacquiring the colonies.

The pair is stripped of their means, and, in a half-nod to Adam and Eve, literally dropped into New Jersey wearing only parachutes and "modesty panels of golden rabbits' fur," which are attached to the body with "thin straps of green snakeskin."

In short order, they've lost their front teeth in a bloody midair collision, fought mano a mano with roughneck bikers and gone undercover as Rastafarians, whereupon they are recruited to steal a valuable work of modern art by someone called Swastika 34 Egg.

And so it goes from one wildly implausible situation to the next, comfortably placing Freddy and Fredericka in the tradition of the picaresque à la Don Quixote.

In the end, though, it's difficult to wade through Helprin's ceaseless merrymaking and get at the emotional lives of his characters; that is, to care about what's happening as their cross-country jaunt gradually changes them.

Freddy and Fredericka is a relatively long book, and comedy, as Helprin certainly knows, is a time-tested way to keep the pages turning. However, there isn't a joke in the novel that he isn't willing to submit to the reader time and time again, eventually exhausting all laughter through simple repetition.

The most repeated and onerous of these jokes is the type exemplified by Abbott and Costello's classic "Who's on First?" routine, where hilarity ensues because of a simple linguistic - or, typically in this novel, cultural - misunderstanding.

Helprin is also fond of goofy Pynchonesque names for his characters; thus, the reader gets an adviser named Campbell Mushrom and the sultry Lady Boylinghotte. An indecisive presidential candidate is named Dewey Knott, which is gold for his opponent's mud-slinging campaign: "America, do we, or Dewey Knott?"

It's indicative of Helprin's overreaching that Knott has relatives named "Askew (aka, Ask)" and "Arwe," and also that his campaign team considers changing his name to "Cleopatra Knott" or "George Washington."

When bumbling Freddy falls down, he, of course, falls naked right into fresh tar, and then manages to find a source of feathers and a gaggle of paparazzi. This brand of comedy is so broad and familiar - seen in Three Stooges movies and on TV sitcoms since time immemorial - that it seems a poor substitute for the genuine wit Helprin displays in the following passage, which describes a minor character named Dr. Rufus and is an example of perfectly rendered human folly:

"\[H]e was fluent in many languages but native in none, his hobby was bass fishing, he knew Sanskrit, loved ballroom dancing, was a self-described 'night-crawler socialist,' carried two dozen tea bags that he sniffed to cure frequent attacks of anxiety and panic, was prone to uncontrollable giggling, preferred German food, took at least six baths a day, and was looking for a wife just like himself."

Much better than recycled gags from Three's Company, that.

Freddy and Fredericka is simply overstuffed with Helprin's insistent crowd-pleasing, which finally smothers the story of his characters' burgeoning nobility and affection for one another under layer after layer of screwball comedy.

Helprin's writing - especially his brief, romantic takes on America the Beautiful - can be quite lovely, but he creates a quite jarring effect by interspersing this soaring prose with extended discussions of whether Fredericka has one bosom or two (or perhaps five) and confusion over the identity of the Jolly Green Giant. It's clear he's doing everything he does in the spirit of fun and readerly pleasure, but there is a limit to how much tickling a person can take.

Freddy and Fredericka

• By Mark Helprin. Penguin, 592 pages, $27.95.

• Grade: B

Traver Kauffman runs the literary weblog Rake's Progress (rakesprogress.typepad.com). He lives in Denver.

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