SLOUCHING TOWARDS KALAMAZOO by Peter De Vries
Little, Brown; 241 pages; $13.95
Author Peter De Vries, 73, has a funny habit of stuffing his works with recondite information. Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, his 21st book of fiction, carries on this 31-year-old tradition. Where did the term all hell broke loose first appear? John Milton's Paradise Lost. What did Nietzsche say on the subject of comedy? "That man has invented laughter because he of all species needs it." Why did Ralph Waldo Emerson quit the ministry? "He couldn't swallow the last supper." How, including names and dates, did the U.S. sexual revolution actually begin?
Wait a minute. This time De Vries has gone too far. Hordes of historians, squads of sociologists have despaired of a single answer. On the other hand, perhaps their field research did not alert them to a long-ago incident: the time is the early 1960s, the setting a small, deservedly obscure village in North Dakota. Anthony Thrasher, 15, lives here and calls the place Ulalume. This allusion to the verse of Edgar Allan Poe helps explain why the boy is still languishing in the eighth grade. He suffers from premature sophistication.
Tony's precocious third-grade essay, "Why I Would Hate to Be a Basement," has long been enshrined in local lore, but his early academic promise has led only to idle fancying. Miss Doubloon, the lad's current teacher, explains to his anxious parents: "He would rather read novels in which the characters toy with a little Brie while waiting for their friends to turn up along the boulevard. If we can't get Anthony to concentrate, and hard, on the War of 1812 and obtuse triangles—" The pupil interrupts: "Like the dumb postmaster and his wife and that boarder they say is fooling around with her, speaking of obtuse triangles?"
Desperate measures are clearly required. Tony's minister father offers to pay Miss Doubloon for the young wag's private tutoring. She agrees and sets her room in the local boardinghouse as the appointed place. Her landlady greets Tony's arrival there with dark suspicion. She senses an aura of incipient scandal hovering about Miss Doubloon. The teacher will, in fact, soon ask her class to read The Scarlet Letter, provoking local bluenoses to declare: "We're gonna tighten our Bible Belt!" On this snowy winter evening, the landlady's wicked mind proves prescient. Upstairs, after some strained academic proprieties, teacher and student fall into the error of each other's arms.
This unpremeditated coupling seems natural enough; yet De Vries sets the moral equilibrium of an entire nation teetering in its aftermaths. These include pregnancy, mutual guilt, Tony's frightened vision of what marriage to his teacher might mean ("Would I be allowed to whisper and chew gum in the house?"). Before she goes home to bear his child in Kalamazoo, Miss Doubloon strikes a defiant pose on the balcony of her motel, where she has been exiled in disgrace from the boardinghouse. Like Hawthorne's adulterous heroine, the teacher wears a scarlet letter A on her chest, with one modern addition: a plus sign on the right side. A badge of shame becomes, presto, a sexual advertisement; the event heralds "the birth of the 20th century T shirt."