Return of Peter Pun

THROUGH THE FIELDS OF CLOVER (275 pp.) -- Peter De Vries -- Little, Brown ($3.95).

Village blacksmiths are a dying breed, and so any village that still has one is obliged to direct tourists pridefully to his shop, even if he is not particularly good at making horseshoes. Something of the sort obtains with jokesmiths; not many comic novelists are left, and not many of these are very funny. Peter De Vries, perhaps the best of the lot, is often proudly accused of causing his readers to damage themselves with violent laughter, but in this book, at least, he is not guilty.

The trouble is that more and more the author is a punster who sees the laughable relations between words, but not those between people. An Indian in the present novel refers to his mother as "Sweet Sioux." A malaproping wife says that a nominal fee is "nominal in name only." At best, this sort of thing produces a sheepish smile, and at worst, a wince of embarrassment. And De Vries is no more able than any other punmaker to hold back his worst. Possibly De Vries' worst refers to a "great" comedian: "Harry has many things that make him grate."

Through the Fields of Clover is concerned, more or less, with What Is Happening to the Sanctity of the American Divorce. A nice old Massachusetts couple decide to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary with a family reunion. All of their sons and daughters have been divorced at least once, and what with all the stepparents and stepchildren, the affair threatens to become the merriest Old Broken Home Week you ever saw.

Some of the author's ideas are first-rate. A blackmailer shows up, for instance, with the information that the matriarch of the clan, who is very lineage-conscious, did indeed have an ancestor who sailed on the Mayflower--but who jumped ship at Plymouth, England, because the weather was unpleasant. And there is a married couple who feud by doing each other's chores--she shines his shoes, and in riposte he Duzzes her undies. Invention of this sort is too much trouble, however, and for the most part the author amuses himself with the same old verbal Yo-Yos.

Early in the book, for example, the reader meets a pubescent lad who talks Elizabethan. Asked when his parents will return from the movies, he replies: "Not till the witching hour methinks, or worse. For no more will th' embattled hombres make their peace in the mesa'd West, their smoking armaments put by, than Cary Grant will post him through such feats as Hitchcock doth concoct." Pretty chilling, but De Vries really sets in a little later when a maiden solemnly informs her swain that "It would be terrible to be regarded as a child-bearing machine."

"A barren prospect," agrees the youth, summing things up nicely.

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