Funny & True

COMFORT ME WITH APPLES (280 pp.)--Peter De Vries--Little, Brown ($3.50).

More than most heroes of this spring's novels, Chick Swallow deserves a wide hearing. His troubles may not be every man's, but every man will understand them. He is modest: "I think I can say my childhood was as unhappy as the next braggart's." He is reflective: "Man is not a donkey lured along by a carrot dangled in front of his nose, but a jet plane propelled by his exhaust." And the surest guarantee that his difficulties will induce immoderate laughter is the fact that he is the creature of Peter De Vries, whose Tunnel of Love (TIME, May 24, 1954) was just about the funniest book of 1954. The laughs do not come as fast in Comfort Me with Apples, but not many humorists now writing in the U.S. can keep up with De Vries even at his second best.

Helter-Skelter. Swallow's fate is that of youth: dreams and aspirations kicked helter-skelter, as real life (a job, the rent, bills, relatives) runs roughshod over them. Chick and his best friend Nickie Sherman see themselves as continental wits, though fate has set them down in the town of Decency, Conn. But when they finish the play they are writing, they intend to take care of that. Wise Acres is the name of the play, and into it they have tooled such precious dialogue as: "There's Ronnie Ten Eyck. He's living with his mother." "Oh, really? I thought that was all over."

Out of Dartmouth, and Wise Acres no nearer the boards, Chick and Nickie watch the hidden land mines of life blowing up all around them. Having told himself, "I must under no condition marry this girl," Chick does marry his beautiful but dumb childhood sweetheart, Crystal. What is more, babies follow. Chick's father-in-law, who runs the advice column for the local paper, gets him a job writing Pepigrams ("All work and no play make Jack"). And then the old boy dies "on third" of a heart attack during a charity softball game, and Chick inherits the advice column.

Headlong Course. From then on, Comfort Me with Apples runs a headlong course--Chick's affair with one Mrs. Thicknesse, his efforts to keep Nickie from marrying his sister, and then the full-time job of finding a job for Nickie. Crystal announces a $65 alienation-of-affection suit, but doesn't go through with it because nothing had really happened with Mrs. Thicknesse (later Chick decides that an affair is like Turkish coffee: "The trick is to stop before you reach the grounds"). Poor Chick is a loser even in small things. When he chides a waiter with "Look, I distinctly asked for a demitasse. You've given me a large cup," he is coldly instructed: "Just drink a little." Finally, here is Chick Swallow, balding and growing a pot, writing: "The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds--they mature slowly." And Nickie, dreamer of superior dreams, goes his melancholy way from a failure as a rookie policeman to driver for the Tidy Didy diaper service.

It all ends a bit better than that, and on the way, Author De Vries has punned the reader to a pulp, winded him with laughs, and done what only truly funny writers can do: exhibit man, frail and vulnerable, with such true ludicrousness that what starts as a belly laugh winds up as a rueful smile.

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