Customer Reviews

Vale of Laughter

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Funny story of a guy named Joe Sandwich and all of his misadventures. Its been over 5 years since I read this book and it's still my favorite by far! It starts out with him as a child who likes to go to confession and instead of confessing his sins he confesses all of his good deeds. It basically about a guy who all through his life he hides behind his jokes.

Peter De Vries is maybe America's best pure comic novelist. The Vale of Laughter is one of his best. Indeed, it is perhaps his most extreme, most insistent, anarchic comedies. It's to novels what Duck Soup is to movies. After this novel, De Vries had to re-group. He had taken his form of black absurdist humor as far as he could.

As the story progress, you see the protagonist Joe Sandwich develops into someone that believes everything is a joke. Religion, marriage, fatherhood, fidelity--none of it matters. As a young man he confesses in the confessional that he's perfect. He recounts his good deed, so irritating the priest that he exits the hidden cubicle to berate Joe and pull his ear. He keeps getting bigger and bigger penances to do for all his good deeds. He also engages in prank telephone calls, ala Bart Simpson (although he predates Bart by about thirty years). On his wedding night, he disrobes to reveal that he has demarcated his entire body like a slaughterhouse animal, noting which parts steak, ribs, etc., with a sash wrap around his penis that has a tag that reads pull for service. He talks his wife into naming their child Hamilton, she only realizing when it's too late that the kid would be called "Ham" Sandwich for the rest of his life. Joe is really likable, personable, even magnetic and lovable, especially in his youth, but he progressively becomes more outrageously compulsive and callous to all feeling. Each time you think that Joe can't become any more outrageous, he pushes the envelope. Slowly it dawns on you: Joe is out to destroy all meaning and outrage all feeling. Joe, in spite of himself, takes comic anarchism (ala, say, the Marx Brothers) to its ultimate: he is the embodiment of nihilism--however hilarious that nihilism is. Something has to give.

And it does. This is a tragi-farce as original and inventive and as felt as De Vries (the author of The Blood of the Lamb) can make it, which is saying something, and it resolves itself as best it can with a truly sublimely absurdist ending.