Comfort Me with Apples

📘 About This Book

A laugh-out-loud novel about teenage pretensions and adult delusions from an author whom the New York Times has called "a Balzac of the station wagon set" Chick Swallow and his best friend, Nickie Sherman, are teenage boulevardiers of Decency, Connecticut, devotees of Oscar Wilde who spend their evenings crafting perverse aphorisms in an ice-cream parlor. "There is only one thing worse than not having children," opines Chick, "and that is having them." Unrepentant aesthetes, someday soon they will be in Paris or New York, far removed from the mainstream. Then the unthinkable happens. Marriage. Family. Dinner parties. For Chick, a job at the local newspaper writing an advice column punctuated by blandly inspirational Pepigrams: "To turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones— pick up your feet." For Nickie, an unlikely career in law enforcement. But just when it seems that their lives have settled down before they could even begin, Chick begins an affair with Mrs. Thicknesse, a newspaper music critic of ample girth and means, and a whole brouhaha breaks loose: blackmail, forgery, secret sleuthing, lawsuits. There is drama in suburbia after all, and Chick and Nickie are up to their necks in it. A wild, witty tale of friendship, marriage, and infidelity, Comfort Me with Apples is full of the brilliant wordplay and delicious ironies that made Peter de Vries "one of the best comic novelists that America has ever produced" ( Commentary).

📖 Summary

Comfort Me with Apples by Peter De Vries presents a sharply humorous exploration of teenage pretension crashing headfirst into the inescapable realities of adult delusion. Set in the suburban landscape of Decency, Connecticut, the novel introduces readers to Chick Swallow and his close friend Nickie Sherman. These two young men fancy themselves unrepentant aesthetes and devoted followers of Oscar Wilde, spending their evenings in an ice-cream parlor concocting cynical, perverse aphorisms about life and society. Convinced that their superior intellect and artistic sensibilities will soon whisk them away from the mainstream to the sophisticated streets of Paris or New York, Chick and Nickie look down upon the mundane lives of ordinary folk. However, life has a way of derailing even the most carefully constructed artistic personas. Soon, the unthinkable happens to Chick. The grand architectural plans of youth are suddenly upended by the very institutions they once mocked: marriage, family life, and the dreaded suburban dinner party. To support his new domestic reality, Chick finds himself taking a job at the local newspaper. Far from writing high-brow literary criticism or avant-garde poetry, his primary duty is authoring an advice column. This column is regularly punctuated by blandly inspirational and utterly banal Pepigrams, forcing him to churn out platitudes like to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones pick up your feet. Through Chick's misadventures, De Vries brilliantly skewers the gap between youthful ambitions and the compromises required by middle-class existence. The novel showcases a master satirist at work, earning the author his reputation as a chronicler of suburban life. Readers follow Chick as he navigates the humorous indignities of domesticity, trying desperately to salvage a shred of his former aesthetic glory while drowning in the sea of middle-class respectability. Peter De Vries uses sharp wit and sparkling dialogue to examine the universal friction between how we imagine our lives will unfold and how they actually play out. Comfort Me with Apples remains a witty testament to the absurdities of growing up, settling down, and finding humor in the everyday compromises of modern life.

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