Madder Music by Peter DeVries

Synopsis: Madder Music by Peter DeVries

Middle-aged, middle-class writer Bob Swirling copes with his puritanical upbringing, his repressed emotions and hostilities, his lack of self-confidence, and his imagined terminal illness by retreating into the identity of Groucho Marx.

Praise

"De Vries at the top of his form"
—Chicago Sun-Times

"Peter De Vries's heroes are exceptionally dotty and exceptionally clever. None more so than Mr. Swirling, the loopy, gifted centerpiece of De Vries's fruitiest and most accomplished new novel, Madder Music."
—The New Yorker

"Vintage De Vries, dry and sparkling"
—Dallas Times Herald

"De Vries is a masterful writer and one of the best humorists of our time."
—Des Moines Register

Summary

Bob Swirling has run out of closets in which to hide. Former and almost former wives and their lovers in sober yet unhinged suburban Connecticut are sending Swirling swirling. What more natural place to escape to than the persona of Groucho Marx?

"A fugue state," explains his psychiatrist to Swirling's divorce-prone wife. "A pathological amnesiac condition. Guilt and sex. Putting on a different shell." And with the seductive assistance of Pauline, Swirling's latest love, he is wham-bammed back to reality, a condition from which he soon recovers with gravel voice, frock coat, and spats... as W. C. Fields.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Peter DeVries

Peter De Vries was born in Chicago of Dutch immigrant parents and was educated in Dutch Reformed Calvinist schools. He graduated from Calvin College in 1931 and held the post of editor, for a short time, of a community newspaper in Chicago. He then supported himself with a number of different jobs, including those of vending-machine operator, toffee-apple sales-man, radio actor, furniture mover, lecturer to women's clubs, and associate editor of Poetry. In 1943 he managed to lure James Thurber to Chicago to give a benefit lecture for Poetry, and Thurber suggested that De Vries should write for The New Yorker. He did. Before long he was given a part-time editorial position on that magazine, dropped his other activities, and moved to New York City. He has remained on the editorial staff of The New Yorker ever since. Peter De Vries is the author of some twenty novels, the most recent being Sauce for the Goose. Penguin Books also publishes his Consenting Adults, or The Duchess Will Be Furious; Forever Panting; and The Tunnel of Love. Peter De Vries lives in Westport, Connecticut, with his wife, Katinka Loeser.