Some time ago I lent my copy of Peter De Vries' Let Me Count the Ways to Kathy, claiming it was the funniest book I'd ever read. Periodically she'd report back that she'd read the first few pages and couldn't go on because the narrator was talking about beating his wife—but only when she deserved it. I had no memory of it starting that way so when she returned it, it went straight to the unread shelf. I finished reading it last night, and, yes, it starts with the narrator talking about how stupid his wife is and how he takes care of that. Then I'm sitting there thinking, "OMG! It's as bad as Kathy said. How could I have recommended this book?" Then I tell myself to read a little further.
Shortly after that I run into the following. Stan, the narrator, and his wife argue about the part religion should play in their son's rearing. Stan: "'You want to raise him as a believer,' I says in the bathroom doorway drying my back after a shower. 'I want to raise him as an atheistic. O.K. We'll compromise. We'll bring him up an agnostic. That's my last offer. That'll be middle ground, from where he can make up his own mind later.' Elsie (Stan's wife) said, 'That logic is a little like your logic when we were going together, remember? You said, "You want to get married, I don't. We'll compromise—we'll live together."'" (pages 10-11)
I giggled and read a bit more, coming to a point where Stan quotes a writer: "I read a something in a magazine I'll never forget. It was a quotation from a writer whose name I can't recall. Maybe it was someone named Swift. (Bets on whether Stan remembers correctly or not?) He said, 'You can't reason a person out of a position he hasn't been reasoned into.' Check, but away we reason—to stone walls. What got my cork was Elsie's refusal to be ruffled any more than she could be budged. All my rantings, which finally become blasphemous, were met with the same meek longsuffering; she was witnessing for the truth while men reviled her. Not being able to get a rise out of her was like the frustration of trying to slam a door with one of them suction stops on it—which was the case with the screen door I tried to huff out of. It just sprang back at me with a Christian huff." (page 11) Ah. Humor and the occasional well-expressed truth. I was hooked.
Not unexpectedly, I reacted differently to the book on this my third (fourth?) time through. The sections I found hysterical the first time now produced smiles. But the element of surprise was obviously gone. I do think I appreciated deVries' artistry more this time. The book is divided into three parts, the first narrated by Stan, the second Stan's son, Tom, and the third Stan again. In each section I was amazed at how well deVries steps into each voice. The language used by each does a wonderful job of moving the story and making each character unique.
Let's look at specifics.
1) Tom becomes president of the college where he teaches through a hodgepodge of unexpected events and finds that most of his time is spent writing letters. "I continued (to be?) very conscious of the signature I put to these letters, developing at last one that seemed to me a happy blend of feeling and intellect, imagination and discipline. What do we strive for but these? My t-bars were streaks of bird flight, high above the main body of the letter, which itself, however, indicated both feet on the ground." (page 249) Yes, Tom is indeed a character who would fixate on such things.
2) Tom talks about three fellow professors. "All Harvard alumni, they were known as the Harvard Group, or, by me at least, the Three Little Prigs." (page 251) Got it on the second skim.
3) New word: honyock—a rustic oaf.
4) At the end Stan sums it all up. "If you want my final opinion of the mystery of life and all that, I can give it to you in a nutshell. The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe." (pages 306-307) Other books have arrived at similar conclusions. Which is it—I can never remember—42 or 24?
