Uncle Gatsby in Connecticut the Prick of Noon

By R.Z. Sheppard

Crack a Peter De Vries novel at random and you are likely to find a Midwesterner trying just a little too hard to keep from making a fool of himself among the sophisticates of the Northeast. The journey from Pocock, Ill., to Decency, Conn., has been played forward, backward and sideways, sometimes strictly for laughs and often, as in The Blood of the Lamb, to illustrate that comedy is not the opposite of tragedy but its Siamese twin.

The serious side of De Vries has been subject to considerable analysis, most of it attempts to align the author's dour Dutch Calvinist upbringing with his development as a comic writer. To borrow a De Vriesian analogy, such treatment is like putting the reader into a diving bell and taking him down 3 ft. His latest novel counters that effect by granting his fans a chance to wet their feet once again in the forbidding shallows of sex, money and social class.

There is, of course, the usual danger of getting nibbled to death by puns: "Haul up your socks and sintillate"; "Tending a cemetery is a grave responsibility." "It Midas well be spring," says a man fixing his car muffler. The book's conspicuous title can have a number of meanings, all socially redeemed because the line is Shakespeare's ("The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon," Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 4). But there are no star-crossed lovers, only heavenly bodies tumbling from orbit to bounce in the bed of Eddie Teeters, a producer and sometime actor in pornographic videocassettes piously merchandised as sex-education films.

Teeters, recently transplanted to Merrymount, Conn., is from Backbone, Ark., where a scarcity of cultural opportunity has sharpened perceptions of social reality. "The trouble with treating people as equals," he says, "is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you. Such reprisals seriously disrupt the pecking order, especially in a democracy where the class distinctions are so much more finely balanced than in other systems."

In short, Teeters walks the tightrope between the egalitarian ideal and the reality of status. Merrymount society allows him to play the game, though it does not spell out the regulations. Rule 1 is that friendliness and even sexual intimacy do not automatically confer acceptance. Rule 2 is that the home team gets to suspend Rule 1 whenever it wants to flaunt its self- assurance. Cynthia Pickles, local ice princess and founder of Overview ("a journal of opinion for all sides"), coolly sleeps with Teeters, accepts his nuptial propositions but marries smooth, rich Jerry Chirouble. Pickles' underclass equivalent is Toby Snapper, a waitress whose services to Teeters include imitations of a pliant Cockney maid.

De Vries relies on literary parody, verbal burlesque and a baleful eye for "life-styles." The result is a deftly improvised confusion in which the suburbs become the stage for fragments of Elizabethan comedy, bits of Wodehouse farce and a generalized send-up of The Great Gatsby. There is even a climactic courtroom scene in which Teeters must defend himself against charges of smut peddling. Unfortunately, he has arrived in Merrymount one beat behind the conservative backlash and cannot convince a jury that his cassettes are the visual equivalent of The Joy of Sex.

The trial is oddly didactic. It is as if De Vries suddenly said, "To be serious for a moment," and then contented himself with a dramatization of research into sexual censorship cases. Neither the subject nor the ways of the law seem to arouse his inventiveness. Why else sour this section with such statements as "Cutter rumbled on in much the same vein, repeating himself to an extent that seemed to wilt the judge's briefly revived interest" and "Nothing was said for or against censorship that you haven't heard a thousand times"?

But then, the bludgeoning formalities of the bar were bound to numb a writer of De Vries' talents. His language has never been a weapon but an instrument of delight and celebration. Even his weakest puns and gibes are forms of * appreciation for the unaccountable variety that is the raw material for his humor. The Prick of Noon, his 22nd novel, may not be his strongest performance. But at 75, De Vries still projects a vision that is fresh and sensuous. His is a comedy that does not reduce character with sociology and psychology but sees instincts and folly through the eyes of a naturalist. Cynthia, Chirouble and their smart set are part of a "habitat group" whose chatter includes such recognition calls as "If you're ever in Trieste there's a little restaurant around the corner from . . ." and "She's taking Harry's death quite well, as who wouldn't." Teeters is a booby bird who has flown well out of his range. "O tempura, O mores," is his idea of eloquence, not a prize malapropism that could only get him another plate of fried fish at a Japanese restaurant.