Customer Reviews

The Mackerel Plaza: Library Edition

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Peter DeVries is probably the best American comic fiction wirter(as in funny, humorous, witty, sophisticated, highly intelligence) of the 20th century, and he seems on the verge of going totally out of print. This would be an enormous shame. He's always funny and readable, but his best work is on a plane all its own.

The Mackeral Plaza was published in the mid '50's and has to do with a recently widowed Minister (of a progressive Protestant denomination) with the last name Mackeral, who has fallen in love (he thinks) andwants to remarry, but finds the going difficult because his congregation and the community at large consider his late wife something of a saint, and so everyone naturally assumes he will be content to remain a widower for the rest of his life. Thus, until he can find a way to let his congregation down gently, he is seeing his new beloved on the sly, as if it were an illicit affair, which in a way it is.

An original proposition, which many of DeVries's books are noted for. The plot gets more complicated as he tries to placate his would-be bride, who has had enough of his cowardice and wants him to make their relationship public, and as he aslo slowly realizes that his late wife's sister, who has been living with him as a housekeeper/helper, is in love with him. Fine, Fine, comic novel, just slightly below his earlier Chick Swallow novels, Comfort Me With Apples and The Tents of Wickedness, and the later Reuben, Reuben and Let Me Count the Ways. For a unique example of tragi-farce, see his The Blood of the Lamb. All his books are noted for verve (where things go from one absurd pan to another absurd fire, often veering into black humor) and invention, and a trademark style, embellished with much linguistic play (one of my favorites is the whole cracker barrel pepigram thing in Comfort Me With Apples). I envy everyone who has not yet read DeVries. They have a great treat in store.

Andrew Mackerel, a trendy pastor of a trendy Connecticut church, perhaps Unitarian, finds a new wife and God's grace (mediated through other people) in this wildly funny and ultimately touching satire. Read it and you will find that the witty quotations widely extracted from it can be used to misrepresent it, as on many militantly atheist WWW sites.

Although the header of the sub-head ( a DeVries-ism should, he see it) is mis-spelled (MACKERAL PLAZA is the actual spelling)would give reverand Mackeral somthing approaching a heart attack, the book itself has more to do with the reverend giving himself a heart attack. His wife died in a canoe accident, so he blames himself. But at the church gathering where he and she were canoeing a churchmember has recorded all on Super-8 Film. His sister in law comes to his rescue(after a fashion), and all turns out well. The ususl DeVries-isms (naked under the overcoat, jacket...)