The opening chapter of Madder Music … is as sustained a piece of comedy as anything DeVries has ever achieved. His effects cannot properly be conveyed by quotation since the dazzling edifice he builds depends upon his unique capacity to pile one witticism precariously on top of another. Like Oscar Wilde he believes a good remark is worth repeating, but there is enough fresh material for the reader to overlook such lapses as "she was one of those women you don't give a book because they've already got one". Just occasionally he reveals too much of the stage machinery: a character called Betty Tingle remarks to the hero as he fondles her breasts "You're making Betty Tingle"—worth it for the triple entendre?

Madder Music is the story of the events that forced the hero to escape into the character of Groucho Marx. DeVries makes play with those reversals of the natural order of things that occur so often in everyday life…. As in his previous novels, DeVries delivers numerous homespun insights … into the curious workings of the human mind: they are always expressed with deft economy—"nothing will make a man a model husband faster than infidelity."

DeVries's satire is as accurate as ever: he successfully derides many contemporary American institutions, including modern art, psychiatry, the real estate business and of course current sexual mores. But his satire lacks passion—and one suspects he would not really wish the world very different from the way it is for then there would be less to laugh at.

In some of the novels of his middle period, such as Reuben Reuben, Peter DeVries combined a feeling for the comedy of the human situation with genuine feeling for its victims. Madder Music and its immediate predecessor, I Hear America Swinging, revert to the style of earlier novels such as Mackerel Plaza. The characters are mouthpieces for DeVries's own witticisms—a nice device for disclaiming a bad joke. He has moments of sympathizing with them, but even then he holds them at a considerable distance: his hero is "unfit for either marriage or adultery, being restless in the one and remorseful in the other". When DeVries's verbal inventiveness flags, his lack of serious interest in his characters makes for the occasional dull page, but he remains one of the most stylish of living novelists and much, much the funniest.