The Tents of Wickedness Author:Peter De Vries Charles Swallow fancies himself a Marquand sort of hero, but the flashback touched off by the reappearance of an old girl friend turns out to be pure Faulkner. It concerns a childhood incident in a coalbin, too obvious for words, but related with hilarious obscurity. To get Sweetie Appleyard off his moral doorstep, he tries another literary tack... more », the Scott Fitzgerald; but she goes a little farther as a Free Spirit than he had intended, when he undertook her re-education, and before he knows it she is persuading him to father a child for her out of wedlock.
Proust, Graham Greene, Dreiser, Thurber, Hemingway are all sent in in turn, like substitutes from a bench, to save the day - but it's no good. Pregnant, the rebel folds in the stretch, leaving our hero holding the bag in a fine Kafka nightmare indeed. « less