The Tents of Wickedness by De Vries, Peter - 1959

Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1959. First Edition. Hardcover. Good. 276 pages; light edge wear to boards, spine sunned a bit, front board warped slightly; Charles Swallow fancies himself a Marquand sort of hero, but the flashback touched off by the reappearance of an old girl friend turns out to be pure Faulkner. It concerns a childhood incident in a coalbin, too obvious for words, but related with hilarious obscurity. To get Sweetie Appleyard off his moral doorstep, he tries another literary tack, the Scott Fitzgerald; but she goes a little farther as a Free Spirit than he had intended, when he undertook her re-education, and before he knows it she is persuading him to father a child for her out of wedlock. Proust, Graham Greene, Dreiser, Thurber, Hemingway are all sent in in turn, like substitutes from a bench to save the day - but it's no good. Pregnant, the rebel folds in the stretch, leaving our hero holding the bag in a fine Kafka nightmare indeed. A Joycean delirium climaxes a literary revel also strewn with mimicries of modern poets from Emily Dickinson to Dylan Thomas, in the form of samples of rather derivative verse Sweetie writes. Written in a a dozen styles, this is a gem of parody as well as another narrative treat by this comic novelist.