The effect is hardly commensurate with the cause, and De Vries’ hero is left looking like a mildly repentant Robert Ingersoll with crumby hands. In fact, for the hero, his daughter’s illness and death merely stir up the dormant bitternesses, and it is only fair also to add that these bitternesses are surely more noble in their display at the end of the book than they were at the beginning, with exceptions: there is a disgraceful episode in which the hero, whose daughter has just died, hurls a soggy cake at a Christus in a Roman church, hits the statue full in the face, and has a fantasy in which the statue’s hands slowly rise to wipe the cake out of its eyes. To be fair, it should be added that many of these old chestnuts occupy De Vries’ hero in the years when he is growing up in Chicago among the Dutch garbage-collectors of the area, and arise later from his hero’s recollections of his life with his psychotic father and long-suffering mother and other members, lay and clerical, of the Dutch Reformed community. Worked in and out among the various medical and social and lyric observations on the death of the child (the only daughter of the widowed hero, Don Wanderhope) are De Vries’ pronouncements on faith, doubt, grace, divine love (and hate), cosmic justice, the bad hands dealt one by fate, God, the genes, and so on. The plot is chaotic, episodic, and thin, but the theme, when it finally settles down to work, is the death of a young girl of eight.

De Vries was reared in a strict religious group, the Christian Reformed community of Chicago’s South Side, and the culture he absorbed through the skin, with the habit of strong responses to great human affairs that distinguishes groups which take their religion seriously (all salvation and grace, or none if none, none with a vengeance), is dyed deeply in him, will not wear away, can be hidden for a time under a suitable cosmetic, but is ineradicable, and hence, perhaps, his choice of theme in this novel.Ĭhoice of theme, but not of plot. The trickle of high-level religious novels has become a runnel in the last few years, and it should surprise no one to find even Peter De Vries, the author of The Mackerel Plaza (surely the finest spoof on fading religious modernism in recent literature), adding to the flow with his latest novel, The Blood of the Lamb.

The Blood of the Lamb, by Peter De Vries (Little, Brown & Company, 1962, 246 pp., $4), is reviewed by George Harper, Associate Professor of English, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Cannibal Valley by Russell T. Hitt