(2 of 2)
According to taste, Tillie's matrimonial ordeal in Witch's Milk will seem touching, crazily unconvincing, or hopelessly sentimental. But read back to back with The Cat's Pajamas, it removes all doubt about De Vries' allegiance to domestic commitment, however grotesque. In Hank Tattersall's swinging world, everything is possible, therefore nothing is binding. Like Pete Seltzer, Hank, too, talks about outrageous products. But he does so only in ironic mockery of himself and the commercial world. By contrast, Seltzer's crazy products are mainly dreamed up as a kind of cheerful game to be played with his dying son, and so become part of the sacred conspiracy of the living to make life seem less of a grim joke.
Tillie appears only at the tag end of Pajamas, as a social worker checking on Tattersall. Confronted with the dipsomaniacal dog, a house full of rotting food and stacked dishes, and the mongoloid boy mumbling at the sink, she gets off one of those deadpan lines in which De Vries reveals the madness of the rational world—the thundering irrelevance of good liberal intentions about to founder in a sea of chaos.
"Do you think," she asks Tattersall severely, "this is a good environment for an idiot?"