Galloping Lust, Crawling Remorse

By Melvin Maddocks

SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE by Peter De Vries; Little, Brown; 232 pages; $11.95

Peter De Vries is one of those sad comics with bloodhound eyes who seem to be sniffing their gloomy way toward the ultimate one-liner: "All flesh is as grass." Or "Id is not just another big word." Or maybe: "Nostalgia isn't what it used to be." The perfect allegorical hero for De Vries might be a Dutch Calvinist furniture mover from Chicago (like De Vries' father), carrying the world on his shoulders--especially the heavy end with the lode of guilt.

It is one thing for a De Vries reader to look forward to one more evocation of the Last Judgment as reflected in a fun-house mirror. But how does De Vries himself do it at 71, after more than 20 novels? How does he manage to conduct a cast of characters on yet another tour between Terre Haute and hell, with nobody quite able to tell the difference? It may be practice, it may be panic. It may even be genius. Whatever his secret, the author of Sauce for the Goose again earns the degree of Master of Antic Angst.

The master tends to assign his novels a topic. In The Mackerel Plaza it was the state of religion in the U.S. I Hear America Swinging concerned the manner and mores of the newly liberated male; Comfort Me With Apples chose the form of parody for a series of hilarious lectures on modern literature. Here, sexual harassment is the ordure of the day. Voluptuous, innocent Daisy Dobbin, an investigative reporter, is sent undercover into New York offices to collect evidence for her feminist editor Bobsy Diesel. But it is the leathery Bobsy who does the harassing, vigorously attempting to seduce Daisy.

De Vries' males, as usual, are not much of a moral improvement on women, proving Daisy's dictum: "Men were all alike, though, of course, some were more alike than others." Dirk Dolfin, a one-man Dutch conglomerate with wavy blond hair and dazzling teeth, possesses the two essentials of a De Vries hero: galloping lust and crawling remorse. He is as briskly efficient at lovemaking as he is at self-reproach. After a romp among the paper clips, Dirk's afterplay consists of pillow talk about eternal damnation. Then, subsequent to monologues on, say, the doctrine of supralapsarianism, the old Dutch cleanser marches his partner to the tub and scours her flesh with the same manic energy normally devoted to saucepans.

De Vries has his own compulsion, operating with an old-fashioned belief that more is more. In Sauce for the Goose, subplots sprout out of subplots. He even deploys amnesia in one story line, forgetting just why the line began in the first place. No pratfall is beneath him. His pun can still be mightier than his word, and he delights in portmanteau items, as in the case of the little band of fundamentalists who obstinately refuse to cut their "umbibli-cal" cord. But at times his verbal games can become so outrageous that you can't see de words for De Vries.

Yet no matter how silly the names and games, the playground is condemned. In a Chinese restaurant, dropping a saccharine pellet into her tea, Daisy suddenly interrupts the stock jokes with thoughts about age fit to shatter a fortune cookie: "What a series of discarded selves each of us is . . . one beneath the other, like successive paintings on a single canvas." Indeed, the author's most dangerous game is never one of verbs but of dogmas, in this case religious and feminist. No other ism has yet been able to tempt him from the chastity of his sole conviction: skepticism. Even so, De Vries, nose pressed against the stained glass, gives the impression that he would sacrifice anything--even his faith--to join some congregation, any congregation. Which is why after the bodies and psyches have been exploded all over the fun house, there is a final try at affirmation. In The Blood of the Lamb, a novel about death in the family where the black completely eclipsed the humor, De Vries carved out a desperate little ledge above the abyss for his pulpit. "Human life," he wrote, " 'means' nothing. But that is not to say that it is not worth living."

In Sauce for the Goose he saves his exhortation for perhaps the only institution he half-believes in: matrimony. Who among his devoted followers can doubt that the union of Daisy and Dirk is intended as an upbeat ending? Especially after these life sentences: "A gray-haired man in his sixties named Christian Crocker had the floor.

"'I don't for the life of me understand why people keep insisting marriage is doomed,' he was saying. "All five of mine worked out.' " --By Melvin Maddocks

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