In praise of Peter de Vries

[AdamSmith]

Peter de Vries was a tragicomic genius of a writer. Hardly ever spoken of nowadays. Pity. His novel The Tents of Wickedness is one of my five or six favorite pieces of literature, period, full stop.

This article gets it:

...Let us now round out the De Vriesian world, for it is a richly appointed place, not unlike Westport in appearance, not unlike Cheever country in social mores, not unlike Nabokov in verbal fluency — but utterly unique in wit. De Vries wrote funny about drinking: “This Chablis is, how shall I say, Kafkaesque.” He wrote funny about sex: “ ‘Sometimes I think this leg is the most beautiful thing in the world, and sometimes the other,’ I said. ‘I suppose the truth lies somewhere in between.’ ” He wrote funny about disillusionment: “One dreams of the goddess Fame and winds up with the bitch publicity.” He even wrote funny about writing: “I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.”

Mr. De Vries wielded similes like a circus knife thrower: “Released from their supports her breasts dropped like hanged men.” Often similes served as preludes to a greater sorcery, springboards for literary high-dives and arabesques. Here’s what he conjures with “a hat like a shot fowl”:

It was tilted down one side of her face at an intendedly jaunty angle, but recalling rather something plunging to earth in the autumn weather, this image to be linked with that of men crouched in duck blinds or taking aim from rowboats in the pitiless weft of things: predators themselves predestined prey in the immemorial Necessity; kin together not only with the poor feathered thing plummeting earthward in the gray dawn, but with all sentient life locked forever in communal doom. That kind of hat...

http://www.mofflymedia.com/Moffly-Publications/Westport-Magazine/April-2006/The-Return-of-Peter-DeVries/