Laugh When It Hurts

LET ME COUNT THE WAYS by Peter De Vries. 307 pages. Little, Brown. $5.

No reader has any business being amused, or even feeling comfortable, in the company of Peter De Vries. At one irrepressible level, the man masquerades as a humorist, perfectly capable of reeling out one outlandishly felicitous conceit after another. The conceits abound in this book. "Get divorced while you're young," says one character to another. This is not funny. It is in the same key as that timeless anecdote of the Indian victim, trussed and scalped, who is asked bv his saviors if he is in any pain. "Only when I laugh," he says.

It is time to end the masquerade. De Vries stands appalled at the equations of life, and cracks tragic jokes about it. The stuff of Let Me Count the Ways would be funny if De Vries' characters didn't bleed. Is it comedy or tragedy, for instance, when Stanley Waltz, the Polack piano mover in this slice of Midwestern life, ruptures himself trying to haul his piano-sized paramour into the bedroom? Is it really hilarious that Stanley spends night after night in his own yard watching his own wife undress, and must then justify this irrational behavior to the police? And when another misadventure exposes him to public humiliation, what is the proper reaction to Stanley's response, which is a hangover lasting twelve years? A guffaw?

"You begin with the fact that everything is awful. That any two people are mismatched, that nothing will work," says Tom Waltz, Stanley's son, who has been invited to escape the limitations of his fate at Polycarp, an educational institution in Slow Rapids, Ind., where the Waltz grass dies every summer. He is more grammatical than his old man, but that is all. He too is a prisoner, trapped by circumstance and surrounded by the De Vries wit, which leaks out all over. And why does it? Because, in extremis, scalped and trussed, there is only one thing to do. Laugh.

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