"I seem to bear my share of responsibility, for the chuckles and chortles, all of them naturally nervous and not a few hideously forced, that went around our dinner table." This admission by Anthony Thrasher, the narrator-hero of "Slouching Towards Kalamazoo," could well be mistaken as an authorial plea for indulgence on the part of Peter De Vries. When not "hideously forced," most of his jokes seem silly or simply pointless. Still, in a novel that is devoid of believable characters, compelling narrative and moral resonance, the jokes are probably the best thing to be had.

Certainly, Mr. De Vries is capable of more. Though critical comparisons to the likes of P. G. Wodehouse, Max Beerbohm and Evelyn Waugh have always been overdrawn—his apotheosis is perhaps a reflection of how impoverished American humor truly is—Mr. De Vries has proved, in the past, that he can be a masterly entertainer and social satirist, acutely observant of how our edifice of morals has slowly crumbled and decayed. His sensitivity to language and its inflections has made him a gifted parodist, and at his best, he uses his wacky, compulsive humor to illuminate our vanities and pretensions.

Instead of developing as a novelist, however, Mr. De Vries has continued, over the years, to produce novels that are remarkably the same: most of them feature narrator-heroes—much like Anthony Thrasher—who suffer from a conflict between their spirits and their bodily desires; most explore the tension between Eastern sophistication and Middle Western provincialism, and most boast preposterous, gag-filled narratives, in which one absurd event is followed by another.

"Slouching Towards Kalamazoo" is no exception…. The main purpose of [the action], of course, is to provide an armature for Mr. De Vries's jokes—jokes that often seem all too familiar as well. For instance, the novel's central, continuing gag—in which Hawthorne's Hester Prynne earns an A-plus for her sexual abilities, instead of an A for adultery—is borrowed from the author's "Reuben, Reuben," and the young hero's penchant for parodying T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" recalls a sendup of the same poem in his "Madder Music."

As for the other comic routines in "Slouching Towards Kalamazoo," there are the usual De Vries mixture of puns, [aphorisms and riddles]…. The jokes about birth control and dandruff, though stale, are harmless enough; but others, made at the expense of women and small-town residents, have a nasty, prejudicial edge. To make matters worse, these jokes simply tend to sit there on the page as lumpy, unalloyed one-liners; they serve no larger comic vision and are never integrated into the drama.

Nearly all the characters in "Slouching Towards Kalamazoo," in fact, share Mr. De Vries's sense of humor. At least they all talk in the same self-conscious, pun-filled language, and they all have the same annoying penchant for turning conversations into games of verbal one-upmanship, dropping literary quotations and allusions as though they had recently memorized Bartlett's.

As a consequence, the exchanges between Miss Doubloon and Anthony, between Anthony and his father—between almost any two of the characters, for that matter—sound very much alike, and the tension that usually arises from the clash of differing viewpoints never gets developed. It is as though Mr. De Vries were reading a play aloud and performing each of the parts in his own monotonous voice—a curious lapse, given his ear for the nuances of slang. For the reader, it makes for very tedious reading indeed.