Review: The Tents of Wickedness, by Peter De Vries

Review: The Tents of Wickedness, by Peter De Vries

A review by Rich Horton

Peter De Vries is one of my favorite midcentury American writers, and one somewhat neglected these days. This is in part because he was a comic novelist, and his primary subject, suburban adultery, may have lost centrality as time passed. For all that though, he could be very funny indeed; and he could also be very serious, in the midst of comedy, as with my choice for his greatest novel, The Blood of the Lamb.

The Tents of Wickedness (1959), however, is not quite a success. It's a sequel to Comfort Me With Apples, from 1956. The main character, Charles (Chick) Swallow, was also the main character in Comfort Me With Apples, and in both novels he is tempted into adultery, though in very different ways. In the first novel, he had just taken a job as advice columnist for the local paper in Decencey, CT, the Picayune Blade; and through the course of the novel his advice had at times backfired, in particular in the case of his brother-in-law Nickie. He still has that job in the new novel, and Nickie is still a problem -- indeed, Chick's sister is ready to divorce him.

But the main engine of the plot is Beth ("Sweetie") Appleyard, a girl he had dated in high school but had never managed to get into bed. As The Tents of Wickedness opens, he and his wife are going to a neighborhood party -- and it turns out Sweetie is to be their babysitter. This is a bit of a problem for Chick, as he's convinced his wife will ferret out their shared past. But the big problem is Sweetie herself, who has gotten stuck in an extended adolescence. And her father seems to blame Chick -- for an incident in the coalbin when they were very young; and then, paradoxically, for not deflowering Sweetie when they were teens. 

So Chick ends up entangle in various schemes to get Sweetie to mature. This involves at first a number of parodies she has written of prominent poems, which Chick manages to get published. On the strength of this Sweetie moves to Greenwich village, but, disappointed that the boys she meets seem too serious, she returns to Decency, and tells Chick that she wants a child, but doesn't want to get married. Chick refuses to impregnate her until is seems she'll choose Nickie instead, and so to try to save his sister's marriage, he nobly sleeps with Sweetie.

The results of Chick's various maneuverings, along with Nickie gaining a second personality as a master thief, not surprisingly gets Chick in more and more trouble. Add in Sweetie's father getting involved with a British woman who might have her eyes on the family fortune; plus changes at the newspaper, and then an attempt to place Sweetie's child with an appropriate adoptive family, and ... well, lots of tangles.

The problem is, these tangles end up being a bit tiresome, and not terribly convincing. The characters are not as well realized as many of De Vries' characters -- particularly Sweetie, who never really comes to life. And the novel itself is a stylistic tour-de-force, that only works about half the time -- the chapters are written in the style of a series of well-known novelists. For me, alas, while I had no trouble figuring out when the novelist was Austen, or Hemingway, or Kafka; I was stymied by the likes of John P. Marquand. More importantly, though, the effort of mimicry -- well enough pulled off -- seemed to interfere with De Vries' comic timing, and the book just isn't as funny as his best work.