<div>An irresistible comedy about faith, desire, and middle-class morality from the man described by Kingsley Amis as &ldquo;the funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic&rdquo; Pity the poor reverend Andrew Mackerel of the People&rsquo;s Liberal Church of Avalon, Connecticut. His is the first split-level church in America, a bastion of modern thought and sophisticated virtue, yet even his prosperous parishioners are not immune to the backsliding evangelism infecting other parts of the country. One misguided congregant wants to sing hymns to hospital patients. Another goes so far as to put up a billboard with the message &ldquo;Jesus Saves&rdquo; written in phosphorescent green-and-orange letters. How is Mackerel supposed to write sermons with a vulgarity like that staring him in the face? Worse yet, the recently widowed pastor has fallen in love with Molly Calico, a former actress turned city hall clerk, well before the church is ready to stop mourning Mackerel&rsquo;s saintly wife. Plans are under way for a shopping mall and memorial plaza commemorating the dear departed, and Mackerel must go to ever-greater lengths to keep his new romance a secret and his new paramour happy. Meanwhile, it is becoming clear that his devoted sister-in-law, Hester, has plans of her own when it comes to the reverend&rsquo;s matrimonial future. As Mackerel twists and turns to get what he wants and avoid what he does not, the plot of this rollicking portrait of suburban piety kicks into high&mdash;and hilarious&mdash;gear.</div>

The Mackerel Plaza

<div>A laugh-out-loud novel about teenage pretensions and adult delusions from an author whom the New York Times has called &ldquo;a Balzac of the station wagon set&rdquo; Chick Swallow and his best friend, Nickie Sherman, are teenage boulevardiers of Decency, Connecticut, devotees of Oscar Wilde who spend their evenings crafting perverse aphorisms in an ice-cream parlor. &ldquo;There is only one thing worse than not having children,&rdquo; opines Chick, &ldquo;and that is having them.&rdquo; Unrepentant aesthetes, someday soon they will be in Paris or New York, far removed from the mainstream. Then the unthinkable happens. Marriage. Family. Dinner parties. For Chick, a job at the local newspaper writing an advice column punctuated by blandly inspirational Pepigrams: &ldquo;To turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones&mdash;pick up your feet.&rdquo; For Nickie, an unlikely career in law enforcement. But just when it seems that their lives have settled down before they could even begin, Chick begins an affair with Mrs. Thicknesse, a newspaper music critic of ample girth and means, and a whole brouhaha breaks loose: blackmail, forgery, secret sleuthing, lawsuits. There is drama in suburbia after all, and Chick and Nickie are up to their necks in it. A wild, witty tale of friendship, marriage, and infidelity, Comfort Me with Apples is full of the brilliant wordplay and delicious ironies that made Peter de Vries &ldquo;one of the best comic novelists that America has ever produced&rdquo; (Commentary).</div>

Comfort Me with Apples

<div>A masterwork of literary parody about a suburban Samaritan and the poet he seeks to inspire After the wild adventures of Comfort Me with Apples, Chick Swallow has found domestic peace in Decency, Connecticut, accepting his fate as a middle-class husband and father and the author of an advice column in the local newspaper. His hard-won contentment is about to disappear like warm water down a bathtub drain, however, when fate intervenes to reunite our hero with Sweetie Appleyard, a childhood playmate with whom he once shared an intimate moment in a coal bin. All these years later, Sweetie is just as devoted to art and allergic to the real world as she always was. In an effort to bring Sweetie out of her treehouse and urge her on with her life, Chick helps to get a book of her poetry published. But his plan backfires hilariously when Sweetie, with stunning alacrity, becomes the toast of Greenwich Village, tires of the up-all-night bohemian life, and decides that she wants to be a mother. For the father, she has two possibilities in mind: her literary patron or his brother-in-law, Nickie Sherman. To save his sister&rsquo;s marriage, Chick will risk his own and pray that, for once, he can keep everything under control. With a stylistic ingenuity unmatched in modern American fiction, De Vries parodies a dozen different writers in this boisterous tale of New England angst. William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marcel Proust, Emily Dickinson, and Dylan Thomas all make uproarious appearances in The Tents of Wickedness as it gleefully skewers pretensions of every stripe. </div>

The Tents of Wickedness

<div>The sins of the father are hilariously visited on the son in this witty and profound novel about the meaning of it all Stanley Waltz is a Polish American piano mover and pugnacious atheist married to a born-again believer. His heroes are H. L. Mencken and Clarence Darrow, and if he confuses &ldquo;illusion&rdquo; with &ldquo;allusion&rdquo; and thinks a certain style of egg is &ldquo;bedeviled,&rdquo; that does not mean his reasoning is any less sound. Unfortunately, his wife is immune to his intellect and insists not just on saving his soul but on taking their son, Tom, to the local gospel mission every chance she gets. It is enough to drive a man into the arms of a mistress &ldquo;funny as a crutch and twice as perceptive&rdquo;&mdash;and that is exactly where Stan goes. This leaves Tom twice as mixed up as the average son. In the second section of this side-splitting and thought-provoking comedy, he is a professor of English at the local college, his questions about faith, doubt, and morality as unresolved as they are inescapable. As an undergraduate, he stumbled from girl to girl, breaking up with one because she was a nonbeliever, another because she was too pious. His marriage to a beautiful professor of comparative religion is no solution. In short order, he has an affair, breaks his leg, leads a funeral procession hopelessly astray, and suffers a nervous breakdown. Only a miracle can save him&mdash;if he can figure out what one might look like. Stanley and Tom Waltz are a father-son duo unlike any other, and Let Me Count the Ways is Peter De Vries at his insightful, brilliant, lightning-witted best. </div>

Let Me Count the Ways

<div>A brilliant, fiercely funny novel that ponders the eternal question: is it better to laugh or cry? Joe Sandwich is a clown. Not literally, but what else do you call an eleven-year-old who goes to church to confess his good deeds: &ldquo;I did my homework without being told&rdquo;? A stockbroker who gets seasick watching the market tape and claims the gross national product is &ldquo;deodorants&rdquo;? A father who mows curse words into his lawn and names his son Hamilton because, well, who can resist a Ham Sandwich? Prankster, punster, cut-up, card&mdash;Joe needs to crack wise about everything. Has he figured out the secret to embracing the inherent absurdity of life, or is there some terrible anxiety at the root of his compulsion? Lots of people want to know, including his wife, Naughty, who is anything but; his mistress, Gloria Bunshaft; and her husband, Wally Hines, a humorless professor who specializes is the philosophy of humor. &ldquo;If you look back,&rdquo; says Joe, &ldquo;you turn into a pillar of salt. If you look ahead, you turn into a pillar of society.&rdquo; He prefers to live in the moment, from one gag to the next, but the joke he doesn&rsquo;t see coming may get the biggest laugh of all. </div>

The Vale of Laughter

<div>Twin tales of middle-class hilarity and despair from the writer who was dubbed &ldquo;America&rsquo;s preeminent comic novelist&rdquo; by the New York Times When college professor Hank Tattersall sees his former flame, Lucy Stiles, at a campus concert, it sets off a chain reaction that results in one of the funniest and most unforgettable exit scenes in American literature&mdash;involving a locked door, an alcoholic dog, and a punning doppelg&auml;nger. The Cat&rsquo;s Pajamas is the story of how Tattersall, a scrupulous self-reflector, falls from point A to point Z, rushing through a host of identities and indignities along the way. The unexamined life may not be worth living, he discovers, but the examined one is hardly a bed of roses. In Witch&rsquo;s Milk, Tillie Seltzer has her own trials to attend to. Chief among them is her marriage to Pete, the kind of guy who tucks a cigarette behind his ear and calls everybody Frisbee. When they first met, Tillie had more sophisticated tastes&mdash;dark strangers, homburg hats&mdash;but she was also a thirtysomething virgin whose prospects weren&rsquo;t getting any better. When she cracked a joke about the honeymoon being over, Pete believed her. Now stuck in suburbia with a sick child and a philandering husband, Tillie takes a hard look in the rearview mirror. Her search for an escape route will lead her to the most unexpected place of all. These short novels are linked by Tillie&rsquo;s cameo appearance in Hank&rsquo;s narrative and by the thrilling blend of satire, tragedy, and philosophy that defines the one-of-a-kind fiction of Peter De Vries. </div>

The Cat's Pajamas and Witch's Milk

<div>This autobiographical novel of family tragedy by the author of Slouching Towards Kalamazoo &ldquo;moves deftly from manic hilarity to manic fury, and back again&rdquo; (Newsday). The most poignant of Peter De Vries&rsquo;s novels, The Blood of the Lamb is also his most personal. It follows the life of Don Wanderhop from his childhood in an immigrant Calvinist family living in Chicago in the 1950s through the loss of a brother, his faith, his wife, and finally his daughter&mdash;a tragedy drawn directly from De Vries&rsquo;s own life. Despite its basis in personal tragedy, The Blood of the Lamb offers glimpses of the comic sensibility for which De Vries was famous. Written with a powerful blend of grief, love, wit, and fury, De Vries&rsquo;s &ldquo;sensitive treatment of the death of a beloved child it has scarcely a superior in contemporary fiction&quot; (Chicago Tribune).</div>

The Blood of the Lamb

<div>The classic American coming of age novel of a precocious young man and the lessons learned from his tutor by &ldquo;a masterly entertainer and social satirist&rdquo; (The New York Times). It is 1963 in an unnamed town in North Dakota, and Anthony Thrasher is languishing for a second year in eighth grade. Prematurely sophisticated, young Anthony spends too much time reading Joyce, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas but not enough time studying the War of 1812 or obtuse triangles. A tutor is hired, and this &quot;modern Hester Prynne&quot; offers Anthony lessons that ultimately free him from eighth grade and situate her on the cusp of the American sexual revolution. In Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, Peter De Vries finds the perfect vehicle for his eridute wit in Anthony&rsquo;s restless adolescent voice. Demonstrating a fascination with both language and female anatomy, Anthony&rsquo;s pitch-perfect narration propels this satirical coming of age tale through theological debates and quandaries both dermatological and ethical, while soaring on the De Vriesian hallmark of scrambling conventional wisdom for comic effect.</div>

Slouching Towards Kalamazoo

<div>A comic novel of ambition and infidelity in the suburbs by &ldquo;the funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic&rdquo; (Kinglsey Amis). Harking from the golden age of fiction that skewered the middle-class American dream&mdash;the school of John Updike and John Cheever&mdash;this novel by the author of Slouching Towards Kalamazoo looks with laughter upon the lawns, cocktails, and creature comforts of suburbia, as well as the antics and anxieties that lurk just beneath its manicured facade. De Vries&rsquo;s classic situation comedy The Tunnel of Love follows the interactions of a socially insecure, pun-loving family man, an officious lady caseworker from an adoption agency, and a chauvinist pig&mdash;all of whom are neighbors who know far too much about one another&rsquo;s private lives. In this farcical tale of marital quibbles, De Vries employs his verbal fluidity and singular gift for wordplay to offer readers &ldquo;his Scarlet Letter, in which adultery leads not to a consciousness of sin and repentance but to a neurotic guilt and the delicious enjoyment it affords&rdquo; (D.G. Myers, from the introduction).</div>

Peter De Vries

Books By Peter De Vries (9 Books)