Lessons from the Dead

THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB (246 pp.)--Peter De Vries--Little, Brown ($4).

In all the novels of Peter De Vries, life's devious ways have been crosscurrents in a happy sea of absurdity. In Comfort Me with Apples and The Tunnel of Love, adultery was the only way to hold a marriage together; there was power in futility, wisdom in platitudes and, of course, virtue in vice. But always there have been signs that inside the humorist, a serious novelist was struggling to get out. Now, in The Blood of the Lamb, absurdity becomes tragic, and De Vries says what has been on his lips all along: life is a joke, and a bad one at that.

Things begin with a blithe accounting of the hero's pubescent urbanity in Chicago. Don Wanderhope is his name, and, true to it, he drifts along in a vague metaphysical search until an unbearable succession of catastrophes strands him in suburbia, somewhere between Westport and Decency.

Fear of the Devil. Wanderhope's family (like De Vries's own) are Dutch Calvinists who worship "a god scarcely distinguishable from the devil they fear." But when his elder brother dies pointlessly at the age of 19, Don loses his faith and adopts his brother's creed of worldliness and atheism as his own.

After that, it is just one damned thing after another. But all his bad news--at first--comes in light voices that in their humor are vintage De Vries: "Here you have the bronchi at the point where they empty into the diatribe," his Old World doctor says by way of telling him he has tuberculosis. He leaves the tuberculosis sanitarium to visit his father, now ensconced in an asylum where the carefree staff has diagnosed him a "Nervous Wreck." Horrified, Don packs his father off to a country rest home where he is amazed to meet his old fiancee. He accepts guilt for her troubled mind, and, in the face of dark signs, he marries her.

Grotesque Reality. The amusements of youth suddenly disappear, and the only laughter that remains is in echoes from the past. The shift in tone is perhaps explained by the fact that the novel is autobiographical in part, but De Vries makes no apology. The dramatic departure from the comic is one of the grotesqueries which, De Vries says, "are too strong for the delicate stomach of Art but in which reality abounds, as though life itself enjoys laughing down the aesthetic proprieties."

Madness takes its final hold on Wanderhope's wife, and she kills herself after "six months in a sanitarium under the care of a psychiatrist who could do no more than apply a poultice of polysyllables to a wound he could neither see nor understand." Wanderhope is left with a daughter who is herself condemned to die of leukemia at twelve. During the ordeal of visits to the hospital as she lies dying, he turns back to take some measure of the faith lost at his brother's deathbed.

In the end, Wanderhope rejects the comforts of belief and accepts the final existentialist absurdity--that man must abandon the search for his meaning in a meaningless world. With this, he musters the bitter courage to return to a life he can neither bear nor depart.

De Vries's conclusion: man is, indeed, saved by grace--not the gift of grace but by grace of his own making, by the grace created between men. Says Hero Wanderhope: "I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious. The quest for meaning is foredoomed. Man has only his own two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: Reason, Courage and Grace. And the first plus the second equals the third."

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