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Tony is not halfway to the end of his adventures when he follows Miss Doubloon to her home town. Absurdities interrupt non sequiturs. Plot grows so complicated that it seems easier to tell than summarize. But De Vries is only half kidding. The fine cutting edge of his comic vision comes, as always, from the sense that there is hell to pay. The author, a resident staffer at The New Yorker, was raised a Dutch Calvinist, and he is a past master at striking antithetical poses. He is at once the liberal humanist, tolerantly condoning free expression and yearnings of the flesh; he is also the hooded inquisitor, meting out appropriate punishment whenever anyone tries to have a little fun.
In Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, De Vries makes that conflict both hilarious and explicit. Tony's father debates a local dermatologist, who happens to be the town's most vocal atheist, on the subject of Christian belief. Their spirited exchange, waged before an enthralled and partisan audience of locals, is declared a draw. But the combatants have persuaded each other to switch positions. The minister resigns his post and faith, moves east and becomes a suave, voice-over pitchman in dog food TV commercials; the doctor takes up tub-thumping evangelical crusading. Late in the novel, a rematch is arranged. Once again, the debaters each wind up convinced that the other is right, but this time they embrace on the middle ground of skeptical belief. Tony gladly joins them: "My new mystique is the more constructive in that I am both cursing the darkness and lighting a candle."
Perhaps the only force that can embrace these opposites is the meliorism of humor, which happily abounds in this novel. The author's favorite trick is the fast shuffle, the scrambling of conventional wisdom to produce a comic insight. Describing an unconsummated love affair, Tony says that "the spirit is willing but the flesh is strong." And this wayward narrator even pretends that being funny is not what he has on his mind at all. Objecting to the word, he plans "never to chuckle, neither do I wish to be the cause of others' doing so." On this point, as on so many others, De Vries cannot be serious. —By Paul Gray