The Mackerel Plaza … is at once Peter DeVries' funniest and most characteristic novel, the loveliest jewel in the whole remarkable strand of his achievement. Immensely successful among mere readers, DeVries' work has been conspicuously overlooked by academicians and by the more solemn ideologists of contemporary literature. What he offers, however, that is missing from such celebrities as Thomas Pynchon or John Hawkes are modesty, humor, warmth, intelligibility. What he may be thought to lack in comparison is high seriousness (and perhaps a certain gratuitous obscurity). Like all genuinely funny writers, DeVries lulls our critical instincts. Nonetheless he projects a vision no less complete, no less interesting, no less insistent for being also comic.

The opening of The Mackerel Plaza, for example, sets briskly in motion a number of themes—the forward-thinking, back-sliding minister; the collision of literary styles like billboards and sermons; the irritably rational communication of males undercut by women; the displacement of religious values by what he elsewhere calls "Freudianity"—and as the book proceeds, we realize, they continue to swim mysteriously in and out of view, circling constantly and effortlessly, like fish in a bowl. Most followers will recognize these themes as typically DeVriesian…. Where Thurber's women loom menacingly above his cowering males, shrewish commandos dressing down the craven-hearted, DeVries' women dominate more subtly. They allure, they fascinate, they contrive. Emphatically sex objects—" She was naked except for skin, blouse, underthings, stockings, and shoes," Mackerel observes—they provoke his men to involuntary, fatalistic wooing, and the plots of his novels tend to suggest Walpurgisnacht in suburbia, an off-beat but rhythmical dance of approaches and retreats.

His men like to court with language. Parodies, quotations, aphorisms are their plumage, and everyone thinks of DeVries' novels first in terms of their wisecracks: "She was a thin, frail bulldozer of a woman." "Horticulture is nine-tenths destruction." "He's one of those doctors that think ninety percent of their patients are quacks." But his women, despite their inattention, reveal an even more remarkable, perverse power of language, a malapropulsion that leaves the men gasping in alarmed admiration: a sexual free-lancer is "AM-FM"; according to Miss Calico's mother, "when we speak of putting down roots we don't mean sticking in the mud"; suicide is "not a viable alternative." And that mothers and mothers-in-law so often produce these cliches only underscores our impression that some earthy, exclusively female creativity is at work.

Moreover, these women often release in DeVries' men a stream of surrealistic fantasy that he likewise shares with Thurber….

The other-worldliness of such women suggests one reason why DeVries' men fail to find common ground with them. It also suggests how closely women are associated with the religious turmoil that permeats his novels. (p. 30)

The wisecracks, too, may be associated with DeVries' religious musings. Their unusual condensation, their zany luxuriance remind us that in Freudianity jokes are like dreams, which clear our way briefly, tantalizingly into forbidden areas of consciousness. Puns, jokes, fantasies and dreams are momentary, inconstant structures imposed upon the ordinary real world, as Mackerel might philosophize; they organize it temporarily much as religion organizes our world and intermittently gives it meaning…. DeVries' striking habit of metaphor, a figure of speech that reconciles incongruities—he "popped from the door like a slice of bread from a toaster"—further impresses us with how deeply his concern for organization, for design, reaches, and how fragile such order necessarily is. Similarly, his plots curl gracefully, confidently through their serpentine complications, only to break free at the end with a gasp, dashing past us like a hare from the woods. (pp. 30-1)

Like most modern comic novels, The Mackerel Plaza grows less and less funny toward the end. The drama of Mackerel's defrocking makes us squirm; public disgrace, paranoia, even accusations of murder darken the scene; an interview between Mackerel and his doctor in the People's Liberal psychiatric clinic creates the same dimly humorous unease we feel at Malvolio's imprisonment in Twelfth Night. DeVries lacks that offhand kind of seriousness which permits Auden to remark casually somewhere that God is a bore. His sense of potential disaster gives his humor, like Evelyn Waugh's and sometimes Kingsley Amis', an indistinct quality of apprehension…. Rare is the universe like P. G. Wodehouse's where the threats of comedy never slip their leash. DeVries' novels, however, are always turning imperceptibly into tragic ones, in which the laughing fates hunt down his characters remorselessly; not for nothing is he inclined to take his titles from Romantic poetry….

DeVries' most characteristic effect is of detonation, of order flung violently apart—an effect found not simply in the tension of his inimitable wisecracks, but also in the explosions with which this beautiful book subsides.

But The Mackerel Plaza concludes in safety, in a classic renewal through marriage and, bringing its two major themes together, an ironic comparison of a designing woman and a designing God. And if Mackerel has lost his faith (a matter no more serious, he confesses, than losing a wooden leg in an accident), like every husband he has gained a mystifying and irrepressible goddess: "Her body against me was like a bursting star." (p. 31)