Paradise Mislaid

By Paul Gray

I HEAR AMERICA SWINGING

by PETER DEVRIES

211 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

I hear America swinging ...

All free in the great freedom that

is to come, that is already

here, I declare it as I

celebrate it,

Every man taking unto himself

a wife, no matter whose,

Every woman taking unto herself

a husband, no matter whose.

--Peter De Vries, after Walt Whitman

A terrible blight is creeping through the Iowa cornfields. "It's what they call brittle dialogue," explains Ma Sigafoos, an entrepreneurial food franchiser who hawks home cooking under the brand name of Land's Sakes. "It's come from the East, and is working its way West, just like the Rocky Mountain tick coming the other way." A prize victim of this plague of sophistication is Farmer Herkimer ("Heck") Brown, Ma's son-in-law, who has taken up with a fast crowd in Middle City. Heck now wears E.E. Cummings T shirts, affects an "inner-city laugh" and argues that both monogamy and the Puritan work ethic are strictly for the crows. When Wife Hattie asks him to dust the crops, Heck quips, "Oh, the maid will dust them."

Can this ever-less meaningful relationship be saved? Bill Bumpers, a fledgling marriage counselor and self-described "victim of an intact home," tries his best. He advises Hattie and Ma to humor Heck in his plan to set up a menage `a trois with a local sculptress. Hattie promises her husband that Ma will not interfere: "She knows four's a crowd." But the crowd at Pretty Pass (as Heck now calls his farm) keeps growing; no sooner is someone hired to do the actual work around the place than he is seduced by the "crackle of civilized conversation" inside the house and becomes a bedded and bored member of the Brown commune. As identity crises follow, the fields lie fallow. Meanwhile, Bumpers worries lest his consistently ineffectual advice will brand him not just a quack but "a quack manque"

In his 17th novel, Author Peter De Vries, 56, again shows that he is more than a match for the absurdities of modern life. Give him the latest fad, the most flaccidly permissive excuse for current thought, and he will top it nearly every time. With-it Protestantism? De Vries offers a minister who does impressions of movie stars from the pulpit and later throws a brunch at the "Apres Church." The new amorality? He comes up with a mother who boasts that her unmarried daughter is having "one of those no-fault pregnancies." The macho style in Washington politics? "When the tough get going," De Vries notes innocently, "the going gets tough."

In fact, De Vries is regularly able to have his cake and throw it too. He impartially lampoons both home-grown ignorance and cultivated claptrap. The decline of the West is mirrored in the progress of Handyman Clem Clammidge, whom Bumpers encourages to become a "primitive" art critic for the local paper. At first, Clem's relentless know-nothingism is a great hit: "Them nude self-portraits of hers have put her behind in her work." But Clem begins reading other art critics. Soon his critiques bristle with phrases like "Countervailing polytonalities." Only De Vries would have the Gaul to refer to a feed-and-grain store as "the Oat Cuisine." One of his irate wine customers even has "a Beaune to pick with his vintner." Who else would dare introduce a house maid named "Beulah Land"? But he is still very much a moralist without portfolio. Neither hidebound nor skin-crazed, De Vries deplores the passive way his common yeomanry lay down their arms to the sexual revolution. Classical satire could comfortably mock those who aped their fashionable betters; De Vries works in this elitist vein, but he cannot find any fashionable elite worth aping. "This used to be a good country," Bumper snaps at one exasperated point. "Wholesome. Solid. Decent. All our best regional writers have told us that, our poets, our artists. Grant Wood ..." The sentence comes girded with characteristic irony. But De Vries' plague on both the leaders and the led is clear enough. One of Ma Sigafoos' many malapropisms says it all: "A man should be greater than some of his parts

Paul Gray

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