Books: Mother's Lib

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MRS. WALLOP by Peter De Vries. 310 pages. Little, Brown. $6.95.

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.

As a grand entertainment, the book is an animated suspension of De Vries' 30 years' war to unite tragedy and 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).

The 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.

No Kitchen Privileges. Emma, who lives frugally despite stockholdings worth $240,000, has difficulty understanding why Rivers would do such a thing to her. Their relationship had been pleasant, even though she never granted kitchen privileges.

The 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.

Mrs. Wallop's relief does not last long. Her own son Osgood, a struggling writer in New York, publishes a novella entitled The Duchess of Obloquy. Sandwiched in its entirety between Emma's own narrative, it moans the familiar tale of the castrated son. Through its absurd parodic details, however, De Vries engineers a nimble satire of contemporary attitudes on sex, race and Women's Lib.