Spotlight on Neglected Worth: Peter De Vries

Among the things I inherited from my Uncle Bob, apart from an inborn need for an unfailing day long supply of snack food, was a dozen or so paperback copies of the novels of Peter De Vries (1910 – 1993). I have been going through them with gratitude to my uncle, who recommended them to me with missionary zeal.

The novels of Peter De Vries are comedies set in a world that is essentially tragic; most are told from the point of view of a bright young man who is beneath his surroundings socially but superior to it intellectually, like the bright young man who reads to his upper-class girlfriend an essay he has written about Sir Thomas Brown, prompting her to exclaim, “Christ, you’re a smart son of a bitch!”

De Vries’s heroes inevitably find that being a smart son-of-a-bitch profiteth little in this world where the race is not always to the swift, anyway you care to understand that word. Accordingly, the humor that a De Vries hero resorts to as an anodyne inclines to the sardonic. And if you aren’t sure what the words “anodyne” and “sardonic” mean, you will be sure when you finish any De Vries novel.

In the preceding paragraph, I lapsed into Biblical rhetoric, and this was natural because Christian faith, or the loss of it, is a leitmotif in the world of Peter De Vries. If you are of little faith, and regret it, but have realized that you are not going to be able to change that, nor will Anyone with supernatural powers ever care to help you out, you are in a good way to enjoy Peter DeVries.

Religious themes, however, are a backdrop in De Vries novels, with the exception of The Blood of the Lamb, which De Vries wrote shortly after he lost his young daughter to cancer. In this one novel, the tragic burden nearly overwhelms the author’s comic muse — certainly would have, if the hero of the story had not found a way to express his anger against God in a manner drawn from the Keystone Cops.

As a comic novelist, De Vries derived much comfort from the fact that the human race is divided into two sexes. Here too pain and laughter are beautifully mingled. I can’t imagine needing to explain this to any of you.

De Vries was a staff writer at the New Yorker for many years. You can Google him to find out how much he was esteemed by his fellow writers (lots) and by the book buying public (less so). But reading him would be more rewarding.