Split-Level Reverend

THE MACKEREL PLAZA (260 pp.)--Peter De Vries--Little, Brown ($3.75).

Peter De Vries may be the best comic novelist now at work in the U.S. A competing practitioner, England's Kingsley (Lucky Jim) Amis, thinks he is "the funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic." The real test is not the laugh count. Anyone who has read The Tunnel of Love (TIME, May 24, 1954) and Comfort Me with Apples (TIME, April 30, 1956) knows that the gags and puns--sometimes outrageously funny and sometimes just outrageous--are simply the dressing for an underlying rueful kindliness. Ruefully, Author De Vries has picked his targets, among them the more ludicrous foibles of suburbia, people who are at once selfish and self-righteous, silly social and moral postures.

His new novel, The Mackerel Plaza, is a chancy thing. It is both difficult and dangerous to be funny about religion, and Andrew Mackerel is a minister--a rather odd one but by no means unrecognizable. For one thing, he is not too strong on God. His Connecticut parishioners at the People's Liberal Church (P.L. for short) are accustomed to such dogma as: "It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us." This sounds like a perfectly reasonable approach in "the first split-level church in America," a church whose pulpit "consists of a slab of marble set on four legs of four delicately differing fruitwoods, to symbolize the four Gospels, and their failure to harmonize."

Susceptible Minister. Andrew Mackerel loves to be told that he does not look like a minister, and two words that he abhors are "preacher" and "brother." What is more, he is a snide snob about the pious. (When addressed with: "Brother, have you found Christ?" he replies: "Is he lost again?") For those of his parishioners who find the going too rough, there is a Jungian analyst on the church payroll.

As might be expected, the Reverend Mr. Mackerel's problems have only casually to do with religion. A recent widower, he hopes to marry a bit-part actress who has given up the stage but still has the kind of good looks that it takes to disturb a highly susceptible minister. They rendezvous in cheap hotels and restaurants, and he even manages to hire her as his secretary. But his late wife, a woman noted for good works, is alive in everyone's memory. How marry the secretary while the community is even now planning a monument to his wife's memory? This problem is never finally solved; instead, poor Mackerel, busily talking theology, pops into bed with his handsome sister-in-law Hester.

Bedeviling Miracle. On the way to a fairly predictable ending, Author De Vries gets in some funny licks. Do-gooders and civic busybodies are pleasantly pilloried. Above all, streamlined bogus religion gets its lumps ("People's Liberal is a church designed to meet the needs of today, and to serve the whole man"). There is even a miracle thrown in to bedevil Mackerel's ultramodern, watered-down faith. A Dutch Calvinist whose own religious upbringing was of the hellfire, no-nonsense kind, Author De Vries makes Mackerel by turn silly and sympathetic, will shock many readers by sometimes seeming to treasure Mackerel's most far-fetched godlessness.

From highly unlikely material, De Vries has written an amusing book, whose final cut of irony is two-edged. In the end, "Holy Mackerel" accepts not only Hester's charms but her teleological argument for God's existence (she asserts it in tones she might use to uphold the local P.T.A.) and her vaguely benevolent faith--"To be as humane as is humanly possible." Over his morning coffee, Mackerel wonders: "Was that the fruit of human wisdom?" And, sadly, he concludes: "Maybe so."

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