The Tunnel Of Love by Peter DeVries

I found a pristine hardcover edition of The Tunnel Of Love by Peter DeVries at a local thrift shop. Everything about it was in great shape, like no one had read it ~ Indeed, every 20 pages or so there were two pages still attached across the bottom! and I had to slice them apart to continue reading. Amazingly, since it was published in 1954, it sat on someone's shelf unread before finally being edited out to the thrift shop.

Peter DeVries was one of The New Yorker's most popular writers since 1944, and his other novels include No But I Saw The Movie, Comfort Me With Apples, and the more well known Reuben Reuben. All praised for their "wry and gentle humour".

"A novel should have a beginning, a muddle, and an end," the author was recently overheard to remark. I took a chance and gave it an inaugural read.

Tunnel was made into a play, and then a movie directed by Gene Kelly starring Doris Day in 1958. Both concern Augie Poole and his wife humorously attempting to adopt a child in Connecticut. Angie is a cartoonist who not only flirts with the ladies but keeps a mistress. His friend, an editor at The Townsman (a New Yorker style magazine) buys Augie's cartoons at a high price against future ideas in order for Augie to pay for his philandering without his wife finding out.

This is all beside the point, as the narrator and main character in the novel is not Augie but the editor friend. It introduces him and his wife as they prepare to give character references for the Pooles to an adoption agency. They have three children themselves and we follow the family life of kids during the day and cocktail parties and pipe smoking in the evening. They are upper middle class and he commutes into NY from Connecticut on the train. Angie persuades him to reluctantly help finance his artistic mistress, and as much as he chides Augie for fooling around, his mind begins to stray. While the wife is out of town, he meets a young woman at a party who wants to show him her cartoons, and they begin a flirtatious affair. How will he work a girlfriend into his family life? Will Augie and his wife adopt? This muddle even includes Augie's mistress becoming pregnant and offering the baby up for adoption.

He has a dry wit, which he likens to the actor George Sanders, but it is not laugh out loud funny, just mildly humorous. If it was a film, I would have cast Jack Lemmon (making it seem a lot like The Apartment, which is the level of amusement, not hilarity, this novel achieves). Shall I tell you a funny line? Talking about musical instruments, his wife asks why he told the son he could play the shoehorn. He replies, "You can - footnotes".

It's very 1950's middle class Connecticut suburbs ~ a look at marriage and the wandering mind of a magazine editor and his philandering friend. Told from a male perspective where the wife is a sideline, away with the kids for most of the book while he exersizes his roving eye. Some reviews love this book, but for me it was just OK. Not as amusing as I thought it would be, but entertaining.

1954 / Hardcover / 246 pages