Parables of Punsmoke

REUBEN, REUBEN by Peter De Vries. 435 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.

Commuters will instantly recognize Woodsmoke, Conn., as the place where the 6:02 stops, late as usual, to let them off. The churches are so up to date that they are thinking of making divorce a sacrament. Car licenses sport family initials, creating a special problem: After the breakup who gets custody of the plates? The split-levels teem with "potential ex-alcoholics," noncommunicating communications experts, novelists churning out books that start: "Part of him wanted to die. Part of him wanted to live--desperately." In Woodsmoke, says Novelist Peter De Vries, if Hester Prynne once got A for adultery, "Today she would rate no better than a C-plus."

How does De Vries himself rate?

A Peek at Darien. Compared to other satirical novelists whose stock in trade is the pseudosociological peek at Darien, he is a master of the peer-group quip and Freudian pun. But he clearly aspires to a higher level where comedy blends wit, wisdom, and compassion. As one who knows the joke is on him, too, and seeks to mourn the follies of his age with laughter, De Vries customarily earns his A for effort.

Characteristically, Reuben, Reuben is fine as far as it goes--and then suddenly it has gone too far. "Given a little money, education and social standing," De Vries begins, "plus a little of the old self-analysis," any man or woman in America can make a shambles of love and marriage. As witnesses De Vries summons three entirely outrageous characters.

The first is Chicken Farmer Frank Spofford, a native who stayed put and got displaced, "made an alien in his birthplace by immigrants turning it into a tentacle of New York." The second is a womanizing Welsh poet, Gowan McGland (sample line: "The ewe alone knows the ramifications of sex"), who hangs himself when he learns that he is losing the last few teeth to which his dental bridge and sex appeal are anchored. Then there is Alvin Mopworth, a cheerfully heterosexual British TV actor who, after many De Vriesian divertissements, marries Spofford's collegiate daughter Geneva, only to lose her to an incipient lesbian school chum known as Nectar Schmidt.

Dominican Fryers. If these three are at least one too many, Farmer Spofford is consistently funny when he apes commuter-set argot. "I don't see why we eat at this grotesque hour anyways," he mimics. "I mean, isn't it sort of ungodlyish? I mean I couldn't eat a bite now . . . I've got to unwind." Through the punsmoke (Spofford's chickens were bred "in a monastery. They're called Dominican Fryers") looms a message: commuter jargon, with its clutter of self-analysis and narcissism, is not a mannerism; it is a disease.

Fortunately, the affliction only becomes deadly in the second generation. Geneva, a cheerful, taffy-haired Aphrodite by nature, nevertheless coddles her complexes because American women today are "cherished for the resonance of their problems and the subtlety of their needs." She soon gets the idea that Mopworth's insistent sex life is really a compensation for repressed homosexual leanings. Retorts Mopworth: "Your constant unmasking of me masks a deep-seated fear of being unmasked yourself." He struggles heroically. But, as in the original Inquisition, forgiveness can only be bought with a fake admission of guilt. "It's nothing to be ashamed of," wheedles the girl, offering absolution. "It's all, after all, sex."

A Sugared Pill. At his best, De Vries constructs palatably subtle parables of human folly. Like one of the minor characters in his book, however, he has a self-conscious horror of stating the obvious. To dress up his homely conclusions, De Vries detours compulsively into literary didoes, lapses into wild parody, wallows in grotesqueries. To be sure, G. B. Shaw sugared his pill to fool the public. But De Vries, apparently, sugars his to fool himself.

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