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Madder Music
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
- GenresFictionHumorLiterature
221 pages, Hardcover
First published May 27, 1982
1 person is currently reading
76 people want to read
About the author
Peter De Vries
53 books165 followersPeter De Vries is responsible for contributing to the cultural vernacular such witticisms as "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be" and "Deep down, he's shallow." He was, according to Kingsley Amis, "the funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic." “Quick with quips so droll and witty, so penetrating and precise that you almost don’t feel them piercing your pretensions, Peter De Vries was perhaps America’s best comic novelist not named Mark Twain. . .” (Sam McManis, Sacramento Bee).
His achievement seemed best appreciated by his fellow writers. Harper Lee, naming the great American writers, said, “Peter De Vries . . . is the Evelyn Waugh of our time". Anthony Burgess called De Vries “surely one of the great prose virtuosos of modern America.”
Peter De Vries was a radio actor in the 1930s, and editor for Poetry magazine from 1938 to 1944. During World War II he served in the U.S. Marines attaining the rank of Captain, and was seconded to the O.S.S., predecessor to the CIA.
He joined the staff of The New Yorker magazine at the insistence of James Thurber and worked there from 1944 to 1987. A prolific writer, De Vries wrote short stories, reviews, poetry, essays, a play, novellas, and twenty-three novels, several of which were made into films.
De Vries met his wife, Katinka Loeser, while at Poetry magazine. They married and moved to Westport, Connecticut, where they raised 4 children. The death of his 10-year-old daughter Emily from leukemia inspired The Blood of the Lamb, the most poignant and the most autobiographical of De Vries's novels.
In Westport, De Vries formed a lifelong friendship with the young J. D. Salinger, who later described the writing process as "opening a vein and bleeding onto the page." The two writers clearly "understood each other very well” (son Derek De Vries in "The Return of Peter De Vries", Westport Magazine, April 2006).
De Vries received an honorary degree in 1979 from Susquehanna University, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 1983.
His books were sadly out of print by the time of his death. After the New Yorker published a critical reappraisal of De Vries’ work however (“Few writers have understood literary comedy as well as De Vries, and few comic novelists have had his grasp of tragedy”), The University of Chicago Press began reissuing his works in 2005, starting with The Blood of the Lamb and Slouching Toward Kalamazoo.
His achievement seemed best appreciated by his fellow writers. Harper Lee, naming the great American writers, said, “Peter De Vries . . . is the Evelyn Waugh of our time". Anthony Burgess called De Vries “surely one of the great prose virtuosos of modern America.”
Peter De Vries was a radio actor in the 1930s, and editor for Poetry magazine from 1938 to 1944. During World War II he served in the U.S. Marines attaining the rank of Captain, and was seconded to the O.S.S., predecessor to the CIA.
He joined the staff of The New Yorker magazine at the insistence of James Thurber and worked there from 1944 to 1987. A prolific writer, De Vries wrote short stories, reviews, poetry, essays, a play, novellas, and twenty-three novels, several of which were made into films.
De Vries met his wife, Katinka Loeser, while at Poetry magazine. They married and moved to Westport, Connecticut, where they raised 4 children. The death of his 10-year-old daughter Emily from leukemia inspired The Blood of the Lamb, the most poignant and the most autobiographical of De Vries's novels.
In Westport, De Vries formed a lifelong friendship with the young J. D. Salinger, who later described the writing process as "opening a vein and bleeding onto the page." The two writers clearly "understood each other very well” (son Derek De Vries in "The Return of Peter De Vries", Westport Magazine, April 2006).
De Vries received an honorary degree in 1979 from Susquehanna University, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 1983.
His books were sadly out of print by the time of his death. After the New Yorker published a critical reappraisal of De Vries’ work however (“Few writers have understood literary comedy as well as De Vries, and few comic novelists have had his grasp of tragedy”), The University of Chicago Press began reissuing his works in 2005, starting with The Blood of the Lamb and Slouching Toward Kalamazoo.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 16, 2013
“Dr. Josko enjoyed few things more than coining an epigram. But he positively shimmered with pleasure when he felt a paradox coming on” (8).
“ ‘Well, just pick out the mice you do like and we’ll send the exterminator up for the rest’” (12).
“ ‘I was hauled down to the police station and told that anything I said might be held against me. So I said, “Elizabeth Taylor.” But nothing ever came of it…’” (16).
“Swirling turned down the thermostat of his attention to the bare minimum required for following the conversation…” (37-38).
“ ‘…Emerson—who, incidentally, closed his eyes whenever he smiled—certainly a sign of maladjustment’” (53).
“He was no Prufrock, nor was meant to be. Not for him the premonitory qualm, the exquisite hesitation. He ate Becky’s peaches while foraging for even more paradisal fruit…” (56-57).
“…as they rushed together into that First Garden to which kind nature lets us intermittently return, the primordial Eden to whose gates Sin—so far from being the cause of our exile—is often as not the very key” (57).
“The fact that the windows there had lace curtains for some reason made any inhabitants lurking behind them seem more morally critical, and more to be feared by wrongdoers, than if they had been peering out between contemporary draperies” (62).
“The required metaphors tumbled out of him every which way, mixed and unmixed. He felt like both a puffing athlete and a commentator giving a blow-by-blow account of his performance, and then he became still a third self, observing himself doing all this, the spectator for whom the game is played and the color broadcast” (63).
“He remembered his half-blind old grandmother when she was staying with them in their house in old Kazoo, pouring milk over some dry dog food, under the impression that it was breakfast cereal. He had set the poor dear straight, a boy of ten or twelve tenderly wresting the dish from her grasp and fixing her a bowl of Grape Nuts to eat. The next day he found her pouring Grape Nuts into the dog’s dish” (65).
“…holding a leash on which a tiny dog twitched like a trout on the end of a line” (69).
“ ‘Created by God, a little lower than the angels? Rubbish. Man is just another biological happenstance. I don’t consider myself a little lower than the angels at all. I’m just a bit of organic scum infesting the outer crust of one of the lesser planets’” (93).
“ ‘Until this country shall have a new birth of freedom, Caesarean if necessary…’” (94).
“But he did continue to brighten their evenings together with bits of conversational tinsel thrown out from the parlor sofa, now an invalid’s pallet, on which he lay palely loitering” (98).
“ ‘Hawthorne was a voyeur with myopia’” (98).
“ ‘ There are some things, like the spelling of jodhpurs, that can never be made to look right’” (98).
“ ‘Bobolink, are you going to hit the ceiling?’
“ ‘That shouldn’t be too hard. Most of it is on the floor’” (102).
“ ‘Killing time, Pomfret?’
“ ‘Only in self-defense’” (103).
“That was the trouble in a nutshell. Unfit for either marriage or adultery, being restless in the one and remorseful in the other, Swirling often came to compare his plight to that of the platypus, that whimsically improbably little creature that is both aquatic and terrestrial and yet not comfortably either…” (119).
“ ‘Yes, well, I’d ditch the Ohio part, for a rhyme I mean. It’s a trap. Oh me oh my-o. Heaved a tender sigh-o. Life’s no slice of pie-o. Dump you into bathos every time, when what you want is pathos’” (120).
“My strawberries are the envy of the neighborhood. ‘What do you put on them?’ somebody asked only today, ‘Manure?’ I said, ‘No, just cream and sugar’” (130).
“…fluidly resuming the offensive as though he had never babbled this Sophoclean folderol” (133).
“ ‘…what livestock farmers have hoped for since the beginning of time, namely a strain of cows with legs three inches shorter on one side than the other, for grazing on hillsides’” (141).
“But calculated asininity is a very tricky art, and if he kept this up they would very quickly recognize a caricature of Pomfret, poor or otherwise” (141).
“ ‘The author of that charge spent most of his life coming down on people with both feet. Judge was practically all he did. He gave the Scribe and Pharisees bejesus till the very words are terms of opprobrium. He called people liars, hypocrites, whited sepulchers, every name you could imagine. He was a grade-A vilifier. He drove the money changers out of the temple with a whip he made himself. He snubbed his mother and upstaged his family. He finally judged God himself. “Why hast thou forsaken me?” And it wasn’t just people who got his flak. He even cursed that poor little fig tree. He was not a very nice man, but then he probably came by it honestly. His father is said to have driven the first couple out of the garden for nothing more than picking fruit he himself hung on another tree by way of temptation’” (147).
“How much better to be marinated and cooked in the Catholic rather than the Calvinist conscience. Every week to have the sludge cleaned out of your transmission in a latticed booth” (152).
“The recovery of his aplomb was not the first order of business, but he managed to ask with some nonchalance, ‘Do you have a price list I might see?’” (167).
“Swirling’s life, seen as an odyssey of self-justification, like yours and mine, had reached a critical point” (179).
“ ‘I’ll show you my record collection. We’ll play a few overtures and then I’ll make some…’” (193).
“At this point he began to raise eyebrows other than his own” (194).
“ ‘I’m Gaylord Haines.’
“ ‘I’ve got troubles of my own’” (194).
“ ‘Our son threw up in a restaurant the other day, and she said, “That’s enough out of you”’” (195).
“ ‘I’m trying to get the lay of the land—if I can find out who she is’” (195).
“…and then assisted him in hopping on one leg to a chair on the terrace. It occurred to nobody to bring the chair to him” (198).
“ ‘Well, just pick out the mice you do like and we’ll send the exterminator up for the rest’” (12).
“ ‘I was hauled down to the police station and told that anything I said might be held against me. So I said, “Elizabeth Taylor.” But nothing ever came of it…’” (16).
“Swirling turned down the thermostat of his attention to the bare minimum required for following the conversation…” (37-38).
“ ‘…Emerson—who, incidentally, closed his eyes whenever he smiled—certainly a sign of maladjustment’” (53).
“He was no Prufrock, nor was meant to be. Not for him the premonitory qualm, the exquisite hesitation. He ate Becky’s peaches while foraging for even more paradisal fruit…” (56-57).
“…as they rushed together into that First Garden to which kind nature lets us intermittently return, the primordial Eden to whose gates Sin—so far from being the cause of our exile—is often as not the very key” (57).
“The fact that the windows there had lace curtains for some reason made any inhabitants lurking behind them seem more morally critical, and more to be feared by wrongdoers, than if they had been peering out between contemporary draperies” (62).
“The required metaphors tumbled out of him every which way, mixed and unmixed. He felt like both a puffing athlete and a commentator giving a blow-by-blow account of his performance, and then he became still a third self, observing himself doing all this, the spectator for whom the game is played and the color broadcast” (63).
“He remembered his half-blind old grandmother when she was staying with them in their house in old Kazoo, pouring milk over some dry dog food, under the impression that it was breakfast cereal. He had set the poor dear straight, a boy of ten or twelve tenderly wresting the dish from her grasp and fixing her a bowl of Grape Nuts to eat. The next day he found her pouring Grape Nuts into the dog’s dish” (65).
“…holding a leash on which a tiny dog twitched like a trout on the end of a line” (69).
“ ‘Created by God, a little lower than the angels? Rubbish. Man is just another biological happenstance. I don’t consider myself a little lower than the angels at all. I’m just a bit of organic scum infesting the outer crust of one of the lesser planets’” (93).
“ ‘Until this country shall have a new birth of freedom, Caesarean if necessary…’” (94).
“But he did continue to brighten their evenings together with bits of conversational tinsel thrown out from the parlor sofa, now an invalid’s pallet, on which he lay palely loitering” (98).
“ ‘Hawthorne was a voyeur with myopia’” (98).
“ ‘ There are some things, like the spelling of jodhpurs, that can never be made to look right’” (98).
“ ‘Bobolink, are you going to hit the ceiling?’
“ ‘That shouldn’t be too hard. Most of it is on the floor’” (102).
“ ‘Killing time, Pomfret?’
“ ‘Only in self-defense’” (103).
“That was the trouble in a nutshell. Unfit for either marriage or adultery, being restless in the one and remorseful in the other, Swirling often came to compare his plight to that of the platypus, that whimsically improbably little creature that is both aquatic and terrestrial and yet not comfortably either…” (119).
“ ‘Yes, well, I’d ditch the Ohio part, for a rhyme I mean. It’s a trap. Oh me oh my-o. Heaved a tender sigh-o. Life’s no slice of pie-o. Dump you into bathos every time, when what you want is pathos’” (120).
“My strawberries are the envy of the neighborhood. ‘What do you put on them?’ somebody asked only today, ‘Manure?’ I said, ‘No, just cream and sugar’” (130).
“…fluidly resuming the offensive as though he had never babbled this Sophoclean folderol” (133).
“ ‘…what livestock farmers have hoped for since the beginning of time, namely a strain of cows with legs three inches shorter on one side than the other, for grazing on hillsides’” (141).
“But calculated asininity is a very tricky art, and if he kept this up they would very quickly recognize a caricature of Pomfret, poor or otherwise” (141).
“ ‘The author of that charge spent most of his life coming down on people with both feet. Judge was practically all he did. He gave the Scribe and Pharisees bejesus till the very words are terms of opprobrium. He called people liars, hypocrites, whited sepulchers, every name you could imagine. He was a grade-A vilifier. He drove the money changers out of the temple with a whip he made himself. He snubbed his mother and upstaged his family. He finally judged God himself. “Why hast thou forsaken me?” And it wasn’t just people who got his flak. He even cursed that poor little fig tree. He was not a very nice man, but then he probably came by it honestly. His father is said to have driven the first couple out of the garden for nothing more than picking fruit he himself hung on another tree by way of temptation’” (147).
“How much better to be marinated and cooked in the Catholic rather than the Calvinist conscience. Every week to have the sludge cleaned out of your transmission in a latticed booth” (152).
“The recovery of his aplomb was not the first order of business, but he managed to ask with some nonchalance, ‘Do you have a price list I might see?’” (167).
“Swirling’s life, seen as an odyssey of self-justification, like yours and mine, had reached a critical point” (179).
“ ‘I’ll show you my record collection. We’ll play a few overtures and then I’ll make some…’” (193).
“At this point he began to raise eyebrows other than his own” (194).
“ ‘I’m Gaylord Haines.’
“ ‘I’ve got troubles of my own’” (194).
“ ‘Our son threw up in a restaurant the other day, and she said, “That’s enough out of you”’” (195).
“ ‘I’m trying to get the lay of the land—if I can find out who she is’” (195).
“…and then assisted him in hopping on one leg to a chair on the terrace. It occurred to nobody to bring the chair to him” (198).
February 16, 2026
Although very much a product of the seventies - serial bed-hopping, casual marriages - this was much more than the wisecracking I was expecting. The writing throughout is of a high level, witty and erudite. It helps that the wisecracking is all given to one character, so it never lasts long enough to get tiresome.
It's a very difficult thing to do, sustain humour over the length of a novel without it all being about gags or descending into farce. De Vries could do it.
It's a very difficult thing to do, sustain humour over the length of a novel without it all being about gags or descending into farce. De Vries could do it.
November 26, 2021
Another funny Peter DeVries novel with serial adultery and self-questioning. But as usual, so many great lines from the expert that I couldn't put it down. My favorite from this one:
"Becky Tingle's here," she said, rolling her eyes in not altogether mock distraction. "Want to come down? This may be the day when she'll finish a sentence. You wouldn't want to miss that first, would you?"
"Becky Tingle's here," she said, rolling her eyes in not altogether mock distraction. "Want to come down? This may be the day when she'll finish a sentence. You wouldn't want to miss that first, would you?"
October 15, 2025
Been a looong time since I read it, but my impression was that De Vries wrote it to clear out an overstock of puns. Not his best stuff, unless you like him mainly for the wordplay. I mean, I like the jokes, too, but it wasn't "Nostalgia isn't what it used to be" or "I love being a writer, it's the paperwork I can't stand" that made him one of the great 20th-century novelists.
April 11, 2021
Wacky sense of humor - fun
November 22, 2017
comic novel from 77 with elements of farce and some dated liberal soulsearching. the main character spends some of the book under the delusion he is Groucho Marx
November 21, 2015
this book is real funny and smartly written. also, becoming groucho marx is a much cooler way of coping with your shitty life than whatever people usually do.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews