Where Love and Lechery Overlap

By R.Z.Sheppard

CONSENTING ADULTS, OR THE DUCHESS WILL BE FURIOUS by Peter De Vries; Little, Brown; 221 pages; $10.95

Consenting Adults, or the Duchess Will Be Furious is another De Vriesian tumble down that rabbit hole where love and lechery are humorously blurred with a yearning for the Absolute. In short, the novel is a romantic and philosophical farce, a form of entertainment that the author has owned since the publication of such fetching titles as No but I Saw the Movie, Into Your Tent I'll Creep, The Tunnel of Love and Comfort Me with Apples.

De Vries' new hero needs more than fruit. Ted Peachum is a budding aesthete and furniture mover in Pocock, Ill. He is also a parody of that familiar species, the small-town boy with big ideas and an ambition to rise above his station. Who can blame him? His father rereads comic books and hibernates like a bear, his aunt is known chiefly for canceling subscriptions and returning unused portions, and his grandfather contracted a venereal disease at a health spa.

Peachum cannot flee this bunch fast enough; yet, pity the smug chuckler who patronizes this family: "You New York-Dutch-descended, probably wrong-Strauss-loving officer of some music society or civic uplift group," he snaps. "I'd like a peek at some of your Rorschachs, you old sofa-crack feeler, you. Slipping a palm furtively under cushions and into crevices as you fish for coins in other people's chairs in a fashion whose psychological symbolism is all too readily apparent, you cranny rummager, you wrong-Scarlatti admirer. You secretary-treasurer!"

Anyone who talks like that in Pocock is bound to attract the attention of Mrs. d'Amboise, a sculptor "who like all women of quality chewed her gum with her front teeth and rarely popped it within earshot of people with known academic degrees or season subscription boxes to the Opera." At 16, Peachum becomes Mrs. d'Amboise's model and a suitable future suitor for her ten-year-old daughter Columbine.

But Peachum still has higher things on his mind: existential dread, for instance. "When they brought the news to me that another bunch at Oxford had scrapped Causality, I stretched out with an icebag on my head. Then it was all random. Certainty was a gone goose, and the soul with it. The soul was a clinker, cold as the meteorites that fell on Toulouse, Knyahinya and, if memory served, Pultusk and Mocs. Man has no purpose."

The rejected idealist is thus readied for the fleshy pleasures, and the stage is set for one of the author's most durable themes: libertinism and its comic consequences. Columbine matures as a perennial nymph, but she pales beside Snooky von Sickle, the brewery heiress of Wagnerian dimensions with whom Peachum shares many a back seat and shadowy glade. Yet love has its mysteries: when Peachum recalls having made unkind comments about Columbine's "doorbells," he feels a pang of remorse that is followed immediately by a twinge of desire. Peachum's entanglements are due to varying intentions of various d'Amboises. There is, for instance, his lust for Vim d'Amboise's wife Kathy, a Pocock police officer. "But soft," as De Vries might say when the going gets muddy. His explanation is more involved than his predicament: "There was Mrs. d. wanting me to wait for Columbine, with Luke standing by ready to feed me some knuckle pie if I didn't do right by the bijou. There was Ambrose fixing me up with Snooky von Sickle as a way of siphoning my attentions off his sister. And now there was Vim throwing his wife at me for reasons having nothing to do with Columbine at all...What an embarrassment of riches!"

One might make that exclamation about the novel itself. First the riches. The book is full of De Vries' happy wordplay, metaphysical Wiffle Balls, witty oxymorons (Peachum describes himself as a "self-pitying stoic") and perversely amusing ironies (a house burns down because of faulty wiring in a smoke detector). There are also the author's ticklish ways with the jargon of three generations, throwaway lines ("A writer is Like his pencil. He must be worn down to be kept sharp"), and a dandy piece of burlesque when Peachum tries to undress Officer d'Amboise in her patrol car ("Deploying my right hand slowly downward along her waist, I tried to unzip her trousers, but first had to contend with her cartridge belt . . .").

The embarrassments? The plot is meager, the characters wear thin too quickly, the gags are often laid out as if for a garage sale. Consenting Adults does not have the emotional depth or the satiric edge of the author's seriocomedies, The Blood of the Lamb and Reuben, Reuben. In Decency, Conn., a favorite De Vries setting, the commuters and their wives clown around on the wall-to-wall carpeting but hear the steady drumming of eternity on the roof. In Pocock pipes of Pan playing tunes of innocence drown out the ravings of a street-corner Jeremiah. With sin and guilt suspended, the book lacks the touch of tragic relief that has made De Vries a top banana of the Calvinist comedy hour.

--By R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"What I saw next was the Prophet, chewing the firmament up the street. I hurried over.

'Ye whores of Pocock, mothers of abomination, housewives wallowing in your adulteries, the Lord will smite you. Lolling in your tubs scented with bath oils, in houses equipped with burglar and fire alarms. But what are ye safe from while imperiling your own souls? For he who said he would come as a thief in the night will do even so, and all your alarms will avail you naught in that hour when ye shall see him face to face . . . For in that dread day you shall get the message. Without CB . . . it shall be, that's it, buddy boy. For not all the air conditioning in the world can make you anything but a stench in my nostrils, yea an abomination unto my schnozz. You with your disposable lighters, I'll dispose of you saith the Lord. I'll run you through the Handi-Slicer, then I'll stuff you down the Disposall . . .' "

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