Synopses & Reviews
He knows everything about her before they meet: the make of pen she writes with, her exact height, the various honorary degrees she holds. He knows more about her nine novels and 27 short stories than she does herself. Naturallyhe has devoted his life to studying and teaching them, and he reveres them. Also, he is four times as clever as she is.
The Trick of It is a comic and painful voyage of exploration into the creative process and the feelings it arouses in others. The humble academic disciple finds himself admitted to his subjects life, and off to this oldest friend go a series of dispatchesby turns awed and patronizing, reverential and jealous, disingenuous and appallingly frank.
Michael Frayn is the author of ten novels, including the bestselling Headlong and Spies. He has also written 13 plays, among them Noises Off and Copenhagen, which won three Tony Awards in 1999. He lives in London.
He knows everything about her before they meet: the make of pen she writes with, her exact height, the various honorary degrees she holds. He knows more about her nine novels and 27 short stories than she does herself. Naturallyhe has devoted his life to studying and teaching them, and he reveres them. Also, he is four times as clever as she is.
The Trick of It is a comic and painful voyage of exploration into the creative process and the feelings it arouses in others. The humble academic disciple finds himself admitted to his subjects life, and off to this oldest friend go a series of dispatchesby turns awed and patronizing, reverential and jealous, disingenuous and appallingly frank.
"Brilliant . . . The Trick of It [is] comic in the obtuse maneuvering of its hero . . . but profound in its grasp of the opposition between the creative spirit and the critical."John Updike, The New Yorker
"This is a book about who owns the livingness of the living writer; it is funny, moving, intricately constructed and done with an observant wisdom; it also has some of the best jokes . . . a delight."The Sunday Times (London)
"The pace and edge of this novel are swift and cutting; its theme is philosophical and literary . . . Michael Frayn is a master of what is seriously funny."The Guardian (London)
"[Frayn] uses a comic technique for themes that are not funny at all. The reader is softened at first by laughter . . . but then a latent gravity becomes patent though the touch remains light."Anthony Burgess, The Observer (London)
Review
“This is a book about who owns the livingness of the living writer; it is funny, moving, intricately constructed and done with an observant wisdom. it also has some of the best jokes...a delight.” —Malcolm Bradbury,
Sunday Times (London)
“The pace and edge of this novel are swift and cutting; its theme is philosophical and literary....Michael Frayn is a master of what is seriously funny.” —Guardian (London)
“He uses a comic technique for themes that are not funny at all. The reader is softened at first by laughter...but then a latent gravity becomes patent though the touch remains light.” —Anthony Burgess, Observer (London)
Review
and#8220;The funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic.and#8221;
Review
“A humorous novel of the choicest order.”
Review
“De Vries . . . has an acute sense of the absurd and an absurd way of being acute. He has written an amusing, screwball farce.”
Review
“Entertaining in its insouciant parodies of high-flown writing and deadly portrayal of the pretensions of upscale intellectuals.”
Review
“One of the funniest books to come along in any season.”
Review
and#8220;De Vries is that most serious of all individuals, a humorist. With a devilish eye and a merciless skill, he has chronicled the excesses, fantasies, and absurdities of the land of exurbia, particularly that strip of it that stretches along the Connecticut shore east of New York. He has made the region glow on the literary map as if it were illuminated by the phosphorescence of its own decay.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;De Vriesand#8217;s new novel, Reuben, Reuben, is his longest, his most ambitious, and his best. . . . The comedy is still delightful and omnipresent, but the satire is more important and deadly serious.and#8221;
Review
andldquo;A trio of long out-of-print books, republished this fall by the University of Chicago Press, underscores the satirical brilliance of a mostly forgotten humorist. De Vries skewered a distinctly male form of idiocy, demonstrated by characters who are witty, well-spoken, and lacking what a later generation would call emotional intelligence.andrdquo;
Review
“De Vries was an editor at Poetry magazine, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of some two dozen of the wittiest novels you’ll ever read, including the masterworks The Blood of the Lamb and Slouching Toward Kalamazoo, as well as The Tunnel of Love and Reuben, Reuben, just resurrected in handsome paperback by the University of Chicago Press. . . . In The Tunnel of Love, especially, about the wedlocked hurly-burly of restive suburbanites, his Twainian one-liners come like a cataract. . . . Only those with a consummate lack of cleverness wield the word ‘clever’ as an insult, and De Vries demonstrates just how much can be done with a creative intelligence charged by the clever and satirical and ironic. Let us now praise those saints at the University of Chicago Press who possess the smarts and good taste to return to print a peerless American maestro of wit.”
Review
andldquo;De Vries was an editor at Poetry magazine, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of some two dozen of the wittiest novels youandrsquo;ll ever read, including the masterworks The Blood of the Lamb and Slouching Toward Kalamazoo, as well as The Tunnel of Love and Reuben, Reuben, just resurrected in handsome paperback by the University of Chicago Press. . . . A goulash of one-liners does not a novel make, and part of De Vriesandrsquo;s vitalizing talent lies in his storytelling efficiency, his deft command of narrative form. Told, with Rashomon effect, from three wildly distinct points of viewandmdash;a scheming chicken farmer, a Welsh rake who might be Dylan Thomas, and an incompetent British actorandmdash;Reuben, Reuben excavates the suburban eccentricities of 1950s Connecticut. . . . Only those with a consummate lack of cleverness wield the word andlsquo;cleverandrsquo; as an insult, and De Vries demonstrates just how much can be done with a creative intelligence charged by the clever and satirical and ironic. Let us now praise those saints at the University of Chicago Press who possess the smarts and good taste to return to print a peerless American maestro of wit.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;A decade ago, the off-kilter universe created by Peter De Vries was almost forgottenandmdash;his work out of print, relegated to the shelves and Web sites of antiquarian booksellers. But thanks to the University of Chicago Press, which has reissued attractive paperback editions of five of his books so far, the emergency is over. . . . Reuben, Reuben . . . reads at times like a comic masterpiece coated in despair. . . . The longest De Vries novel, it was as if another sensibility had taken charge. . . . There are elements of a plot, although this one is more disturbing and includes a suicide, a miscarriage, and horrific encounters between McGland and his dentists. . . . Because itandrsquo;s De Vries, youandrsquo;ll find Groucho-like dialogueandmdash;andlsquo;andlsquo;You canandrsquo;t resist a pretty ankle, can you, Frankandrsquo; Ella says, and I says, andlsquo;Iandrsquo;ve got my mind on higher thingsandrsquo;andrsquo;andmdash;and puns: andlsquo;Malady of our time. Infectious mammanucleosis.andrsquo; . . . But darkness and doubt keep encroaching. Even Spofford falls under the spell of melancholia: andlsquo;I slip into the shadows, there to remain a minor character in action I have precipitated. Others will come after me, in this unending rigamarole which is Life anyway.andrsquo; The shadows by then were De Vriesandrsquo;s real subject.andrdquo;
Review
“A decade ago, the off-kilter universe created by Peter De Vries was almost forgotten—his work out of print, relegated to the shelves and Web sites of antiquarian booksellers. But thanks to the University of Chicago Press, which has reissued attractive paperback editions of five of his books so far, the emergency is over. . . . The Tunnel of Love [is] an agreeable, even fizzy portrait of postwar suburban America. . . . De Vries’s books certainly respect the conventions of plot and character, but his heart is elsewhere—with his sly, even subversive wit that detonates paragraph after paragraph as the narratives unfold. . . . In the end, the main characters become older if not much wiser, but their goings-on are accompanied by cocktail-party chatter that shows off De Vries’s ear for malapropisms (a woman confesses ‘Did I ever tell you about my aberration?’), epigramic observations (‘There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you’) and one-liners, some of which have become immortal, among them: ‘Deep down, he’s shallow!’ From the start, his comedic gifts were abundant and turned out to be far more enduring than those of such contemporaries as S.J. Perelman and even James Thurber.”
Review
andldquo;Quick with quips so droll and witty, so penetrating and precise that you almost donandrsquo;t feel them piercing your pretensions, Peter De Vries was perhaps Americaandrsquo;s best comic novelist not named Mark Twain. . . . Itandrsquo;s something of a crime against literature that De Vries, whose novels of the 1950s and early andrsquo;60s made wonderful sport of postwar striving, the middle-class move to the suburbs, and generational clashes that would render major cultural shifts just a few years hence, has mostly been forgotten. His 1964 masterpiece, Reuben, Reuben is nothing less than a satiric time capsule of the so-called Mad Men generation, a look at what your square older siblings were up to when you hit the road like Jack Kerouac and wound up in the Haight. Literatureandmdash;in the form of the University of Chicago Pressandmdash;is making amends for its lapses by re-issuing the best of De Vriesandrsquo; works, five comic tomes long out of print.andrdquo;
Synopsis
He knows everything about her before they meet: the make of pen she writes with, her exact height, the various honorary degrees she holds. He knows more about her nine novels and 27 short stories than she does herself. Naturally—he has devoted his life to studying and teaching them, and he reveres them. Also, he is four times as clever as she is.
The Trick of It is a comic and painful voyage of exploration into the creative process and the feelings it arouses in others. The humble academic disciple finds himself admitted to his subjects life, and off to this oldest friend go a series of dispatches—by turns awed and patronizing, reverential and jealous, disingenuous and appallingly frank.
Synopsis
The Tunnel of Love is a goofy situation comedy involving suburban neighbors who know too much about each others private lives. The narrator is an upstanding commuting family man who, faced with awkward situations, plays sick, has small fits of rage, or babbles something inappropriate and/or witty. Like the author, he works on cartoons published in a New York magazine, and uses humor to deal with stress. The plot includes an officious lady employed by an adoption agency, and the confused identities of babies. A pointed satire of suburban life, it is also a retro, lively romp, and more cheerful than some of the De Vriess later novels set in this world.
Synopsis
Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbiathe school of John Updike and Cheeverthis work from the great American humorist Peter De Vries looks with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. De Vriess classic situation comedy The Tunnel of Love follows the interactions of a socially insecure, pun-loving family man, an officious lady caseworker from an adoption agency, and a chauvinist pigall suburban neighbors who know far too much about one anothers private lives in this goofy and gently hilarious tale of marital quibbles. Noted as much for his verbal fluidity and wordplay as for his ability to see humor through pain, De Vries will delight both new readers and old in this uproarious modern masterpiece.
Synopsis
Reuben Reuben is set in mid 1950s suburbia in Connecticut and starts out being told from the point of view of a grumpy but corruptible chicken farmer. The noveland#8217;s second part recounts what happens when a womanizing poet from Wales (clearly Dylan Thomas) visits this new-to-him world of tidy lawns and cocktail parties and liberated lady poets.and#160; In the final third, a British poet/agent named Mopworth continues the story of the confused suburban literati. Fast-paced, devastating, energetic, and laugh-out-loud funny, it also has a manic note to it, as if the author were Scheherazade-like; being compulsively entertainingand#151;scrambling to amuse the reader with stories and jokes lest serious questions arise.
About the Author
Peter De Vries (1910and#150;93) was the man responsible for contributing to the cultural vernacular such witticisms as and#147;Nostalgia ainand#8217;t what it used to beand#8221; and and#147;Deep down, heand#8217;s shallow.and#8221; He was the author of many books, including the classics Slouching Towards Kalamazoo and The Blood of the Lamb, both also published by the University of Chicago Press.
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