The Blood of the Lamb, by Peter De Vries

It seemed from all of this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration:  not going to the stars but learning that one may stay where one is.

--Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb (1961; Little, Brown and Company)

Among the many things that came to mind while reading this marvelous book:  it’s too bad that Peter De Vries is no longer working on the captions for New Yorker cartoons (De Vries died in 1993 and the cartoons have lacked witty captions ever since); that the funniest works of art are usually the most serious; that good books will have a different effect on one during different periods of one’s life. 

De Vries is not widely read these days (few seem to have heard of him); his twenty-five novels are now being brought back into print after many years in the wilderness.  One can almost understand this, as his novels are often considered more a part of the time in which they appeared  than transcendent of it and his struggles with religion are, like those of Graham Greene, sometimes considered irrelevant.  To those of us who lived through the fifties and sixties, however, his novels effectively capture the mordant quality of those years with rich and often withering humor.  I returned most recently to The Blood of the Lamb when I read Jill Lepore’s piece in the Nov. 21 "New Yorker," referring to it in an article about De Vries’s involvement in a project to make a film of a J.D. Salinger story

The Blood of the Lamb particularly stands out now for me in a way it didn’t before I married Susan and we had children.  Protagonist Don Wanderhope, the first-person narrator, overcomes his strict Calvinist upbringing, going to college, marrying and having a child.  He survives the early death of his brother, the madness of his father, the suicide of his wife, only to be confronted with his only child Carol becoming ill with leukemia at the age of 10.  This is one of the few books that have caused me to both laugh and cry.  Wanderhope keeps his sense of humor almost until the end.  One of Carol’s teachers later says to him “Some poems are long, some are short.  She was a short one.”