The Blood of the Lamb by Peter De Vries

I walked out past St. Catherine's to the bar and grill and back again so often through so many hospitalizations that I cannot remember which time it was that I stopped in the church on the way back to sit down and rest.  I was dead-drunk and stone-sober and bone-tired, my head split and numbed by the plague of voices in eternal disputation.  I knew why I was delaying my return to the hospital.  The report on the morning's aspiration would be phoned up to the ward from the laboratory any minute, and what I died to learn I dreaded to hear. 
-- Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb (Little, Brown and Company, 1961)

I often think of De Vries when reading "The New Yorker," the cartoons lacking for many years since De Vries retired from working on their captions in 1987 after more than forty years.  I had read all of his twenty-seven novels as they came out during the same period but had not re-read any until I read in the "New York Times Book Review" several weeks ago that The Blood of the Lamb was Larry Kramer's favorite book that "no one else has heard of."  Reading it now it has a beauty and poignancy that I find quite moving, now that I have a wonderful wife and two delightful children. The best books are appreciated in different ways at different points in one's life.

De Vries never got his due because he was mistakenly identified as a "comic writer" rather than one who correctly sees life as both funny and tragic  The Blood of the Lamb is narrated by Don Wanderhope, who makes a continuous effort to shed his Calvinist upbringing and his anger at God.  He is more successful at this than, say, the characters in Graham Greene's novels, but he also struggles to understand his own suffering:  his older brother dies of pneumonia in childhood, his wife commits suicide and his twelve-year-old daughter dies from leukemia.  Wanderhope pleads futilely with God for just one more year with his daughter, so they can spend it as they have the last year "picking one snowflake and following it to the ground."  When his daughter Carol dies Wanderhope takes the birthday cake he had purchased for her and throws it a statue of Christ and watches it drip off the statue's face, in the way that Carol had appreciated the silent comedians doing when they were hit by pies.