RICHES OF EMBARRASSMENT.(appreciation of author Peter De Vries)

Peter De Vries once observed that "comedy deals with that portion of our suffering that is exempt from tragedy." Few writers have understood literary comedy as well as De Vries, and few comic novelists have had his grasp of tragedy. The determination and artistry with which he approached these subjects made him hard to categorize, which may be why, little more than a decade after his death, he is pretty much forgotten--a sad note on which to begin.

De Vries was certainly a very funny man, consistently and inventively; a number of his coinages long ago found their uncredited way into the language, among them "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be" and "Deep down, he's shallow." A half century ago, his first acknowledged novel, "The Tunnel of Love," which became a Broadway play and a movie with Doris Day and Gig Young, made him moderately famous. On the basis of that and his next novel, a suburban comedy called "Comfort Me with Apples," Kingsley Amis, in the Times, called De Vries "the funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic." Soon enough, reviewers were comparing him to Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Ring Lardner, and Max Beerbohm--immensely gratifying judgments and helpful publisher's blurbs, but somehow less than apt. Looking back at De Vries's work (during nearly fifty years, he wrote some two dozen novels, along with parodies, poetry, short stories, and essays), one can see more clearly that his writing was informed as much by sorrow as by wit, and by the idea, as he put it, that "the rarer human sensibility becomes, the closer it gets to the logic of insanity." And sometimes sorrow won out.

On the dust jacket of "Comfort Me with Apples" (1956) is a photograph of a smiling man with dark hair who appears to be in his mid-forties (De Vries was born in 1910), his arms crossed in a fashionable authorial pose. He's wearing a dark tie and a checked tweed jacket, with a handkerchief poking out of his breast pocket. At the lower left is a blond girl, his daughter Emily, who was then about six, looking pleased with herself, as if she had just sneaked into the picture. It's the only dust-jacket photograph of the author in the company of someone else, and what is unsettling about this familial portrait is our knowledge that four years later Emily would be dead, of leukemia.

If it is difficult to think about Peter De Vries without his puns and wisecracks, it is impossible to do so apart from this central event, or from "The Blood of the Lamb" (1961), his sixth novel, which deals with the death of a child; the descriptions of her sickness and dying are as unbearable as anything in modern literature. There were still bursts of laughter, although darker than in any other De Vries book. (At one point, the narrator's father rants, "Black light! Antimatter! It's all around us. We're all headed for it!" and adds, "The only thing that keeps me from killing myself is the will to live.") But after that his fiction had another kind of mirthfulness. He remained a master of loopy plots and malapropisms--"I've been married seventeen years and never had an organism," one character tells an advice columnist--and an observer of spoiled middle-class white America, a place populated by comfortable yet perpetually ill-at-ease heroes. But the word "humorist" no longer seemed exactly right.

I've recently immersed myself in De Vries's books, and the temptation is to stop here for a bit and start repeating De Vriesisms, the written equivalent of nudging a companion as prelude to reading something aloud: " 'Ah, Tanglewood,' I said, hunched over my plate. 'The soft summer nights, the lovers strolling, the Brahms bursting in air.' " Or " 'So you're the new personnel manager,' I said, ogling her. 'I trust you have a little opening for me.' " Then, there are the epigrams, such as "How do you expect mankind to be happy in pairs when it is miserable separately?" or "What I hate about writing is the paperwork."

In the early books, one was carried along by De Vries's unstoppable gags, his gift for spotting cant, fatuousness, and snobbery, and his grandly silly dialogue. When a woman at a party refers to a "real ...