Year: 1985
Type: article
Abstract: T o Borrow A trope from his colleague T hom as Pynchon, there is a trajec tory to Peter De Vries's comic novels.They are launched by Little, Brown with tasteful ads in the New York Times Book Review, attain apogee w ith at least a score o f glowing reviews, and then subside m ysteriously, inscrutably, while o ur ears ring with the rep o rts o f m uch heavier wits crashing into the b est seller lists.Slouching Towards Kalamazoo shows why.It is as w ry and quirky as Sand bu rg 's " Sins o f Kalamazoo,K and as erudite and am biguous as Yeats's "Sec ond C om ing," b u t these are n o t the m aterials from which blockbuster paperbacks and movies are m ade.De Vries has been shooting for altitude since his first novel in 1940, though, and his readers experience a satisfying vertigo on his latest flight.If Pynchon is o u r Rabelais, De Vries, although he has spoken nearly al his life in prose, m ay be o u r Moliere.T he farce o f Slouching Towards Kalamazoo entangles a fifteen-year-old eighth-grader n am ed A nthony T h rash er w ith his teacher, Miss Maggie D oubloon, in a secret rom ance during his class's study o f The Scarlet Letter.A lthough A nthony, w ho reads Nietzsche and K ierkegaard instead o f m em orizing the chief products o f Venezuela, cannot "m aster the difference betw een a pistil and a stam en ," his affair w ith his teacher results in pregnancy.As this faux pas occurs in 1960 in a rem ote N orth D akota ham let know n to us only as "U lalum e," the consequences are dire.T he consequences for society, th at is, n o t for the transgressors Dimmesdale/T hrasher and P rynne/D oubloon, n o r the offspring, Pearl/A hab.(There is n o Chillingworth.T here are n o m ore Chillingworths; D oubloon's p ro to hippy "form er boyfriend" has ru n off to Nepal, leaving b ehind only the redolence o f incense in h er apartm ent.)It is De V ries's whimsical conceit to attrib u te the sexual revolution o f the 1960s and '70s to a rebellious N orth D akota elem entary school teacher and h e r existentially ja d e d pupil-a pupil w ho "chews gum while he m akes aphorism s," is flunking basic m ath, and
Source: Iowa Journal of Literary Studies
Author: Dan Campion
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W614092365