Word: wallop
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...WALLOP by Peter De Vries. 310 pages. Little, Brown...
Between the time the hammer hits the thumb and the brain signals the bad news, there is an instant when the victim is at peace with the absurdity of the situation. Mrs. Wallop prolongs that moment of truce longer and more cleverly than most of Peter De Vries' previous eleven novels...
...farce, faith and despair. It has none of the wrenchings of personal loss and religious crisis found in The Blood of the Lamb. There are no ghastly satirical accidents or bizarre deaths, such as befall the poet in Reuben, Reuben who hangs himself in an orthopedic harness. In Mrs. Wallop, the grotesque is thoroughly housebroken by De Vries' mastery of the instruments of parody. Literary styles and genres are lampooned, and holy cows milked. But Mrs. Wallop is really a response to the literary mother knockers, from Euripides (Medea) to Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint...
...request for equal time comes from Emma Wallop, a small-town Midwestern widow and retired nurse who wakes one day to discover that her former boarder, Randy Rivers, has published a bestselling novel entitled Don't Look Now, Medusa. A tin-plated Spoon River Anthology, it has as its main character a small-town Midwestern landlady, like Emma herself, given to dislocated clichés and malapropisms...
...truth comes out shortly after Rivers returns to the Midwest to give a lecture. He stumbles off the stage in a drunken torpor, bashes his head and ends up recuperating in his old room at Mrs. Wallop's. She not only takes very effective charge of Rivers' recovery but also manages his love life and press relations. He in turn tells her that the harpy of his novel is really meant to be his own mother...