Mother's Lib

By R.Z. Sheppard

MRS. WALLOP by Peter De Vries. 310 pages. Little, Brown. $6.95.

Between the time the hammer hits the thumb and the brain signals the bad news, there is an instant when the victim is at peace with the absurdity of the situation. Mrs. Wallop prolongs that moment of truce longer and more cleverly than most of Peter De Vries' previous eleven novels.

As a grand entertainment, the book is an animated suspension of De Vries' 30 years' war to unite tragedy and farce, faith and despair. It has none of the wrenchings of personal loss and religious crisis found in The Blood of the Lamb. There are no ghastly satirical accidents or bizarre deaths, such as befall the poet in Reuben, Reuben who hangs himself in an orthopedic harness. In Mrs. Wallop, the grotesque is thoroughly housebroken by De Vries' mastery of the instruments of parody. Literary styles and genres are lampooned, and holy cows milked. But Mrs. Wallop is really a response to the literary mother knockers, from Euripides (Medea) to Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint).

The request for equal time comes from Emma Wallop, a small-town Midwestern widow and retired nurse who wakes one day to discover that her former boarder, Randy Rivers, has published a bestselling novel entitled Don't Look Now, Medusa. A tin-plated Spoon River Anthology, it has as its main character a small-town Midwestern landlady, like Emma herself, given to dislocated cliches and malapropisms.

No Kitchen Privileges. Emma, who lives frugally despite stockholdings worth $240,000, has difficulty understanding why Rivers would do such a thing to her. Their relationship had been pleasant, even though she never granted kitchen privileges.

The truth comes out shortly after Rivers returns to the Midwest to give a lecture. He stumbles off the stage in a drunken torpor, bashes his head and ends up recuperating in his old room at Mrs. Wallop's. She not only takes very effective charge of Rivers' recovery but also manages his love life and press relations. He in turn tells her that the harpy of his novel is really meant to be his own mother.

Mrs. Wallop's relief does not last long. Her own son Osgood, a struggling writer in New York, publishes a novella entitled The Duchess of Obloquy. Sandwiched in its entirety between Emma's own narrative, it moans the familiar tale of the castrated son. Through its absurd parodic details, however, De Vries engineers a nimble satire of contemporary attitudes on sex, race and Women's Lib.

The hero of Osgood's story is Bunk St. Cloud, a struggling New York writer who fathers the son of an ambitious singer, then accepts the role of unwed father while the girl pursues success. As a man, Bunk is ineligible to use the local day-care center, so he dresses in drag when dropping the kid off. Eventually, he is arrested as a transvestite by a policeman, also in drag. The singer returns and demands her rights as a mother. The baby's real father then turns out to be a Negro named Warshawski, with whom Bunk is collaborating on a play about black suburbia called Uncle Tom's Cabin Cruiser. Osgood's novella ends with an unparalleled spoof on a newspaper article that attempts to sort out the complications arising from Bunk's trial as a female impersonator. Who, what, where, when and why keep tripping over each other in a perfect reflection of the problems inherent in attempting to describe Mrs. Wallop as a whole.

Mother Wittgenstein. And so back to Emma Wallop. Maternal impulses still intact, she goes to New York to help Osgood get his life moving. Playing a role somewhere between Prospero and Scattergood Baines. she launches his career by sinking $200,000 into a movie of The Duchess of Obloquy. She also fixes him up with the right woman.

De Vries' obvious point is that, given equal time, all of Emma Wallop's supposed vices as an attentive mother turn out to be virtues. No less obvious is a sporadic echoing of themes that De Vries has treated with deeper feeling and attention in other novels. Matters of love, guilt and faith are often handled in facetious throwaway lines that frequently make Emma resemble one of those New Yorker cartoon matrons who quote Wittgenstein.

That is as it should be. Having sensibly failed to see herself defined in the myths of Oedipus, Medusa or Phaedra, she decides that such quests for meaning are "a pathetic attempt to give ourselves a scope and a glory we do not intrinsically possess." We are, she concludes, "comic-strip characters plain and simple." If Mrs. Wallop is essentially a brisk exercise in pure amusement, that is also as it should be. "I'd rather offer the reader an honest surfboard ride," De Vries once said, "than pack him into a diving bell and then lower him into three feet of water, which is what so many 'serious' writers do."

o R.Z. Sheppard

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