Squandered Talent
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
Squandered Talent Slouching Towards Kalamazoo By Peter DeVries Little, Brown. 241 pp. $13.95. Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellow, Radcliffe In a highly promotional New...
...A boy accuses his string-saving mother of having an anal fixation, and she responds, "Anal my ass...
...Nothing alien," we are told, "was human to Mrs...
...In other words, he says, in a slogan that might serve as a rallying cry for new liberals, "We curse the darkness and light a candle...
...We can only say, as the hero said in The Tunnel ofLovewhen angrily asked by agirl why he was an atheist, "God only knows...
...A woman wears "a shawl with a lunatic fringe...
...New Yorker habits of mind are hard to break...
...But the explanation does not quite solve the puzzle of DeVries himself...
...The mode changes without notice, however, for the sake of a joke...
...Yet it is almost as if he has been afraid to put himself to a sustained test...
...When Robert Swerling, a patient fixed in an impersonation of Groucho Marx, is offered a book, "a philosophical guide to living-and, for that matter, dying," he reproves the doctor for "putting Descartes before the hearse...
...Wallop (one of his sagest books) states firmly: "Astrology is the bunk, as every Capricorn with Mercury in the third house knows...
...There is no room for jokes and puns...
...The title character of Mrs...
...The hero is Anthony Thrasher, age 15 as the story opens, a "star underachiever" repeating 8th grade with very special attention from his teacher, Maggie Doubloon...
...Stubblefield, too, lays unlikely claim to having lived in such an area: "A novelist here, there a couple of cohabiting poets, a local journalist across the street...
...A few weeks after his first fateful tutoring session with his teacher, Anthony is supposedly dry-mouthed with dread as he makes his way to the drugstore on an ominous errand for her, yet he reflects: "If I had to marry Miss Doubloon, would I be allowed to whisper and chew gum in the house...
...In giving credit to the New Yorker DeVries said he had been taught there, above all, that "the bane of real humor is facetiousness...
...Has DeVries at last laid to rest his obsessive conflict over religion...
...Even though this latest novel confronts at length and finally offers a solution to its author's life-long inner conflict between an early deep Calvinist faith and his actively liberated intellect, the comedy of the plot makes it hard to take seriously...
...In passages throughout his work, and consistently for the last half of one book, DeVries has shown that he could be a superb novelist...
...When she asks him if he is not given pause by the contrast between his esoteric knowledge and his inability to name the products of Venezuela, he replies: "A u contraire...
...Lewis to Mallard's Bertrand Russell"), DeVries instantly robs the discourse of dignity by adding, "They were both windbags...
...but [is] mainly intended as a pluckily human commitment to the rockbottom, undeluded maximum belief palatable to an intellect...
...As he tells a slatternly hostess during his house-to-house proselytizing, his young denomination was "founded only partly as a sardonic mockery of all the thousandfold faiths that have untenably preceded it...
...To describe what may well be the author's (and my) home town of West-port, Connecticut, he has Anthony's mother say it is "pretty flesh-potty...
...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellow, Radcliffe In a highly promotional New York Times Magazine interview last spring, Peter DeVries suggested that his writing had been "purified of its defects" by his training on the New Yorker(v/here he is still responsible for much of the cartoon humor...
...Wallop, where a visiting author in the moment before falling on his face reads a chillingly eloquent denial of the possibility of a novelist's quest reaching anything more than "the illusion of meaning while life lasts...
...There is no destination, only a journey...
...So you know what I called it...
...Old Mr...
...This last exchange occurs in Madder Music, a novel that seems almost to have been written to undercut any other attempt to psychoanalyze its author...
...It expresses the same angry hopelessness that caused the shattered father in The Blood of the Lamb to commit an act of ultimate defiance of God, a slapstick blasphemy...
...She reports that a girl who went to New York "ran afoul of an Achilles heel...
...Would we have regular fire drills and recite the pledge of allegiance every morning...
...Keeping Anthony awake during the summer nights when the bizarre ironies of destiny (and DeVries) force them to share a bed, he recalls one of his many sexual conquests...
...Beginning with its title-a literary sacrilege-It is a collage of customary DeVries skills and tricks, many of them brilliant but adding up (if they add up at all) to a total that is maddeningly less than we have a right to expect from someone with his perceptions...
...Anthony, remembering decades later a touching childhood scene with his mother and an old woman on a snowy night, seems to become DeVries when he expresses an "abiding senseof Womankind...
...Though a writer never has complete control over what he writes-Its richness has to flow or be dredged from the unconscious?still, he is not a helpless victim, caught in a psychotic episode...
...The humor is quietly essential to the reporting-when, for instance, a head-bandaged baby sits in his crib intently watching and listening to economists argue about inflation, refusing indignantly to let the channel be changed...
...The countryside there was a series of rolling foothills, accented by jagged granite outcrop-pings, and so was she...
...In it weare explicitly told that Swerlinghas taken refuge in Groucho's machine-gun patter (a virtuoso performance) to escape an intolerable life situation...
...Whether this is due to a fear of testing himself against other thinkers, or appearing as a stuffed shirt-he grew up in the roaring '20s-or to more mysterious resistances, he does not really detach himself from the speech...
...Voicing this statement in the drunken tones of a very dubious writer, DeVries evades responsibility for it...
...DeVries gives another kind of excuse for his wayward approach in Mrs...
...This goes far to explain the almost perverse self-limitation that has resulted in what I think is a serious loss to literature...
...As with all art, there is mystery in his ability to make those scenes of doomed children in a hospital not only bearable but a source of delight...
...I find it exciting to discover and explore divergent and even warri ng elemen t s wi t hi n mysel f, and ex-hilarating to pursue the adventure of synthesizing them into a coherent and viable whole, what I believe Eliot has called a balance of contrarieties...
...A Jewish tailor says about his son's pretentious habit of understatement: "He shouldn't lay it on so thick...
...Slouching Towards Kalamazoo could hardly be more different...
...Later, when a friend tells him she refuses to have children because of the effect on her figure, he says, "Yeah, there is a destiny that ends our shapes...
...After the debates between theinfideland theclergy-man have resulted in an amusing reversal of certitudes, Anthony devises a method of having it both ways-perhaps not unlike his author...
...A well-known writer cannot give to charity because "all his assets are tied up in cash...
...Now, though, in Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, the hero who earlier had taken his chief pride in the coining of slang that has since become current, creates a new religion which, if hardly new or logically a religion, DeVries may want us to take seriously...
...Not only the narrator but all the other characters talk at times in this fashion...
...No description of that final section could do it justice...
...The answer is, of course, Writer's Block...
...Only in The Blood of the Lamb, his 1961 novel written to face and master the unendurable-his 10-year-old daughter's death from leukemia-did he allow emotion to become such a driving force that it stripped the nonessentials from its path...
...Stubblefield is hardly a bookish type...
...I have suffered at its hands seduction, scandalmongering, chicanery, garrulity, silence, false witness, non sequitur, prune whip, and quotation out of context, but respect has endured and affection prospered...
...This specific will surprise the reader of Slouching TowardsKalamazoo...
...Lusk...
...The laughs in some DeVries books follow each other so fast that a conservative estimate for his 21 listed titles might be a total of 20,000 jokes, practically all of them funny, although the formula sometimes shows through...
...He had to let grief have its way, and it was a wonderful way...
...When the narrator's clergyman father debates publicly with the infidel dermatologist to whom the mother is fatally attracted ("Father playing C.S...
Vol. 66 • October 1983 • No. 20
