How the Sexual Revolution Began

By Paul Gray

SLOUCHING TOWARDS KALAMAZOO by Peter De Vries

Little, Brown; 241 pages; $13.95

Author Peter De Vries, 73, has a funny habit of stuffing his works with recondite information. Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, his 21st book of fiction, carries on this 31-year-old tradition. Where did the term all hell broke loose first appear? John Milton's Paradise Lost. What did Nietzsche say on the subject of comedy? "That man has invented laughter because he of all species needs it." Why did Ralph Waldo Emerson quit the ministry? "He couldn't swallow the last supper." How, including names and dates, did the U.S. sexual revolution actually begin?

Wait a minute. This time De Vries has gone too far. Hordes of historians, squads of sociologists have despaired of a single answer. On the other hand, perhaps their field research did not alert them to a long-ago incident: the time is the early 1960s, the setting a small, deservedly obscure village in North Dakota. Anthony Thrasher, 15, lives here and calls the place Ulalume. This allusion to the verse of Edgar Allan Poe helps explain why the boy is still languishing in the eighth grade. He suffers from premature sophistication.

Tony's precocious third-grade essay, "Why I Would Hate to Be a Basement," has long been enshrined in local lore, but his early academic promise has led only to idle fancying. Miss Doubloon, the lad's current teacher, explains to his anxious parents: "He would rather read novels in which the characters toy with a little Brie while waiting for their friends to turn up along the boulevard. If we can't get Anthony to concentrate, and hard, on the War of 1812 and obtuse triangles--" The pupil interrupts: "Like the dumb postmaster and his wife and that boarder they say is fooling around with her, speaking of obtuse triangles?"

Desperate measures are clearly required. Tony's minister father offers to pay Miss Doubloon for the young wag's private tutoring. She agrees and sets her room in the local boardinghouse as the appointed place. Her landlady greets Tony's arrival there with dark suspicion. She senses an aura of incipient scandal hovering about Miss Doubloon. The teacher will, in fact, soon ask her class to read The Scarlet Letter, provoking local bluenoses to declare: "We're gonna tighten our Bible Belt!" On this snowy winter evening, the landlady's wicked mind proves prescient. Upstairs, after some strained academic proprieties, teacher and student fall into the error of each other's arms.

This unpremeditated coupling seems natural enough; yet De Vries sets the moral equilibrium of an entire nation teetering in its aftermaths. These include pregnancy, mutual guilt, Tony's frightened vision of what marriage to his teacher might mean ("Would I be allowed to whisper and chew gum in the house?"). Before she goes home to bear his child in Kalamazoo, Miss Doubloon strikes a defiant pose on the balcony of her motel, where she has been exiled in disgrace from the boardinghouse. Like Hawthorne's adulterous heroine, the teacher wears a scarlet letter A on her chest, with one modern addition: a plus sign on the right side. A badge of shame becomes, presto, a sexual advertisement; the event heralds "the birth of the 20th century T shirt."

Tony is not halfway to the end of his adventures when he follows Miss Doubloon to her home town. Absurdities interrupt non sequiturs. Plot grows so complicated that it seems easier to tell than summarize. But De Vries is only half kidding. The fine cutting edge of his comic vision comes, as always, from the sense that there is hell to pay. The author, a resident staffer at The New Yorker, was raised a Dutch Calvinist, and he is a past master at striking antithetical poses. He is at once the liberal humanist, tolerantly condoning free expression and yearnings of the flesh; he is also the hooded inquisitor, meting out appropriate punishment whenever anyone tries to have a little fun.

In Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, De Vries makes that conflict both hilarious and explicit. Tony's father debates a local dermatologist, who happens to be the town's most vocal atheist, on the subject of Christian belief. Their spirited exchange, waged before an enthralled and partisan audience of locals, is declared a draw. But the combatants have persuaded each other to switch positions. The minister resigns his post and faith, moves east and becomes a suave, voice-over pitchman in dog food TV commercials; the doctor takes up tub-thumping evangelical crusading. Late in the novel, a rematch is arranged. Once again, the debaters each wind up convinced that the other is right, but this time they embrace on the middle ground of skeptical belief. Tony gladly joins them: "My new mystique is the more constructive in that I am both cursing the darkness and lighting a candle."

Perhaps the only force that can embrace these opposites is the meliorism of humor, which happily abounds in this novel. The author's favorite trick is the fast shuffle, the scrambling of conventional wisdom to produce a comic insight. Describing an unconsummated love affair, Tony says that "the spirit is willing but the flesh is strong." And this wayward narrator even pretends that being funny is not what he has on his mind at all. Objecting to the word, he plans "never to chuckle, neither do I wish to be the cause of others' doing so." On this point, as on so many others, De Vries cannot be serious. --By Paul Gray This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.