Synopses & Reviews
Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbiaand#151;the school of John Updike and Cheeverand#151;this work from the great American humorist Peter De Vries looks with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. A manic epic, Reuben, Reuben is really three books in one, tied together by a 1950s suburban Connecticut setting and hyper-literate cast of characters. A corruptible chicken farmer fearful for the fate of his beloved town, a womanizing poet from Wales (Dylan Thomas in disguise), and a hapless British poet-cum-actor-and-agent all take turns as narrator, revealing different, even conflicting views. But alcoholism, sexism, small-mindedness, and calamity challenge the high spirits of De Vriesand#8217;s well-read suburbanites. 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.
Review
and#8220;The funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic.and#8221;
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
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
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
Couples is the book that has been assailed for its complete frankness and praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrait of love, marriage, and adultery in America. But be it damned or hailed, Couples drew back the curtain forever on sex in suburbia in the late twentieth century. A classic, it is one of those books that will be read -- and remembered -- for a long time to come.
Synopsis
"Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death."--Time One of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a book that, when it debuted, scandalized the public with prose pictures of the way people live, and that today provides an engrossing epitaph to the short, happy life of the "post-Pill paradise." It chronicles the interactions of ten young married couples in a seaside New England community who make a cult of sex and of themselves. The group of acquaintances form a magical circle, complete with ritualistic games, religious substitutions, a priest (Freddy Thorne), and a scapegoat (Piet Hanema). As with most American utopias, this one's existence is brief and unsustainable, but the "imaginative quest" that inspires its creation is eternal.
Praise for Couples
"Couples is] John Updike's tour de force of extramarital wanderlust."--The New York Times Book Review
"Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don't see how sex can be written about at all."--Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review
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
John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.
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