Tunnel of Love [1954] uses most of the components of the enduring De Vries pattern: the world is suburbia, USA, and its characters the middle or upper-middle class who are materially advanced but are psychically and comically somewhat in arrears. Here, he introduced marriage—its demands and the flights from it—as one of his central subject matters; as well, De Vries discovers his comic narrator, who so often ostensibly observes the bizarre antics of his fellows but then finds himself gradually drawn into the events and a chagrining self-discovery and revelation….

Tunnel of Love is early, vintage De Vries and was followed in quick succession by a series of adept comic novels with alternating shades of darker tragicomedy. In Comfort Me With Apples (1956) and Tents of Wickedness (1959), he unwinds the complicated affairs of Chick Swallow, who, feeling confined and repressed by marriage, is drawn to the seeming comforts of adultery and role-playing. Typically, the overall movement of De Vries' novels is first a reaction against and then a comic acceptance of the adult community of marriage, and Swallow ends the second book by refusing the tempting offer of a tryst with an old girlfriend, "Thanks just the same … but I don't want any pleasures interfering with my happiness." Tents of Wickedness interests by its style, too: each chapter is a technical tour de force, written in the style of one or another 20th century writer—from James Joyce to James Jones—whose language and plots De Vries parodies.

Among the funniest of the novels are The Mackerel Plaza (1958) and Let Me Count the Ways (1965). Both reveal another central De Vries subject, religion, and especially the plights we face when traditional faiths and beliefs no longer serve us. Surely there is no more absurd picture of a contemporary clergy than the ludicrously liberal Rev. Andrew Mackerel with his split-level church. It is this present expense of spirit that creates the schizophrenic Tom Waltz of Let Me Count the Ways, offspring of an evangelical mother, who gives hand-tooled Bible belts as gifts, and an atheistic father. The result? "You want to raise him as a believer … I want to raise him as an atheist. O.K. we'll compromise. We'll bring him up an agnostic." Tom is finally saved by journeying to the religious shrine at Lourdes; miraculously, here he catches an unknown disease that reunites him with his estranged wife. A third novel, Blood of the Lamb (1961), is a moving tragicomic study of the possibility of faith in face of personal tragedy, the death of a child.

Reuben, Reuben (1964) is De Vries' attempt at a blockbuster. Its three-part structure and triple narration are meant to underscore the difficulty and complexity of its subject, modern love. Its characters include Spofford, a septuagenarian Yankee chicken farmer who becomes co-opted by the suburbia he mercilessly ridicules, and Owen McGland, easily the most damning portrait of Dylan Thomas ever sketched. Reuben, Reuben, to a degree, but much more Cat's Pajamas and Witch's Milk (1968)—two short novels published together—undercut or temper the essential comic tone of De Vries. Integral to De Vries' structures is a plot where the individual moves away from conformity and institutions in order to discover the repressed self. What he typically discovers, however, is that the self is false or distorted outside its community; the novels generally then return the individual to society through reconciliation. But not so Cat's Pajamas, which may be De Vries' most radical vision while still positing a comic world. At the end of the novel Hank Tattersall dies grotesquely, his head pinned in the kitchen side of a doggie door, his torso freezing in the winter storm outside. His Doppelganger, the social conscience that has followed him throughout the book, chidingly envisions the absurdly literal and figurative fate of the De Vries character who resists communal responsibility, "Well, your end is in sight, Tattersall."

With occasional flashes, the eight works after Cat's Pajamas and Witch's Milk … fall off. The characters, never especially believable, become somewhat unlikeable. The essentially optimistic universe is replaced by a more grimly black humorous one. As De Vries' smile freezes into a grimace, love is replaced by empty lust. However, Mrs. Wallop (1970) is interesting for its use of narrative frames and its playful travesty of Philip Roth's wildly successful Portnoy's Complaint. I Hear America Swinging (1976), returns to the Midwest where De Vries grew up in its attempt to deal with archetypal American materials. And Madder Music (1977) compels by its macabre world and its identification and manipulation of two of our bizarre cultural custodians, Groucho Marx and W. C. Fields.

His newest novel, Consenting Adults, (1980), continues De Vries' comic investigation of our cultural experience: "If we can think of this great country of ours as polarized between two sets of James brothers … Frank and Jesse at one end and Henry and William at the other, why, we begin to get some sense of the enormous spectrum in between." Ted Peachum, De Vries' protagonist, thus acknowledges a divergence in our cultural heritage and somewhat schizophrenically tries to live up to both directions of it. If we can take Peachum at his many words, we see the conflicts that tug at this typical De Vries character. Peachum is coming of age in contemporary America, and the cultural elitism represented by the William/Henry James branch attracts the impressionable Peachum, whose early goal is "The society of people who did not ask for ketchup in public restaurants." Naturally, among the characters Peachum is seeking to rise above are his parents, a father who gains national notoriety by hibernating through the winters and a mother who is widely believed throughout the neighborhood (and beginning to believe herself) to be a Turk.

Peachum's method of American upward mobility is to attach himself to various women, this romantic individualism identifying him with the Frank and Jesse James ilk. (pp. 14-15)

A little religion, a good deal of sexual warfare and then victory-making, a cast of unbelievable but effective satiric characters all go toward fleshing out Consenting Adults. De Vries' major theme remains constant too. One of the characters says "We must sooner or later be trundled into surgery for … an illusionectomy," and in investigating human relations and the relations the individual must have with those institutions around him, De Vries has composed his latest novelistic lesson on the text of growing up in modern America, on the necessity of separating workable illusions from those that defeat the individual. "I must find my own idiom," Peachum begins the book, and search he does, through lust, love, and De Vries' rich language to find a compatible way the self can exist in today's world. Like many De Vries characters, he modishly adopts different philosophical poses and stances in an attempt to discover the romantic self. But variously Existentialism, Causality, and Absurdism fail him, and he finally gives in to the lush variety he finds in contemporary life. By the end of the novel he has comically defined himself as a "jilted Narcissist," and with this paradox we are together forced back to the James brothers metaphor that De Vries has insisted tantalizingly represents the comic variance in American experience today.

Although the novel has De Vries' traditional touches—including a certain plot looseness—there are a few differences as well. The characters, while at times farcical, are pleasant and humane, as opposed to the cold and somewhat hostile characters who have frequented his books beginning roughly with Into Your Tent I'll Creep (1971). And the book ends touchingly, perhaps forewarningly, as Peachum envisions his deathbed scene. The elegiac note here might remind us that De Vries is himself seventy years old, that perhaps here in Peachum's comic acceptance of the cosmos with all its flux and paradox is also De Vries' own, that De Vries, like Prospero, may soon be ready to give up his particular brand of magic. Like the world of De Vries' early and masterful fictions, the world of Peachum is comic and positive rather than darkly absurd as in De Vries' later novels, a world that, with all its confusion and chaos, as Peachum learns, beckons commitment, not avoidance.

Taken together, the novels of Peter De Vries form a fascinating investigation into the mores of America over the last thirty years. We tend to neglect De Vries' artistry and insight because of the sheer wealth of his comic virtuosity—a typical De Vries novel contains enough wit for other authors to salt judiciously throughout their canons. But the exuberent comic display masks the unity of comic vision and technique. De Vries' most serious comic devices—fallible narrators, character role-playing, stylistic parody and burlesque, and word play—typically serve dual purposes. They entertain—at times almost overwhelmingly so—but they also reinforce and support his major theme of the illusion-making propensities of the individual, especially when rebelling against tradition or institution. There is a purposeful confluence, then, between idea and form in De Vries' work, a deft union of language, style, wit, and theme that creates an enduring comic vision of the way we live. (pp. 15-16)