The Virtue of Vice

THE TUNNEL OF LOVE (246 pp.)--Peter De Vries--Little, Brown ($3.50).

The pun is widely regarded as the lowest form of humor. This judgment may or may not have been circulated by people who themselves can never think of a pun until they are driving home after the party. The fact is that punsters have gone underground--at least as far as polite literature is concerned. Among the U.S. writers, there must be a vast reservoir of pent-up puns, just waiting for the signal to burst out into the open. That heady day may be at hand.

The conductor and narrator of this particular trip through The Tunnel of Love is a slap-happy cartoon editor named Dick. He sometimes wanders off the track to a dream cottage and holds imaginary conversations with beautiful women: "I like . . . deep woods and the smell of pine," one beauty murmurs. "I love pine." "I love yew," whispers Dick.

"We mustn't," she gasps.

In or out of his dream world, Dick mercilessly piles up perhaps the most outrageous mountain of puns in recent literary history. He wonders if czardas is the name of a song by Hoagy Carmichael.

He notes that a restaurant menu offers a dreaded veal cutlet. He suggests that hic jacet is a sport coat from the corn belt and that ad nauseam is a sickening advertisement. He even tells a dream girl on an ocean liner: "If you care to take a turn on deck, you'll find me forward. Possibly even a bit unscrupulous."

Dick, the unabashed and unregenerate punster, is the funniest part of Author Peter De Vroes's novel. The story is prety funny too--if somewhat special. It is centered in suburban Connecticut, where a slightly adulterous bunch of New York writers, artists and editors repair from their labors to indulge their neuroses and libidos. Cartoonist Augie Poole is one of them, a 16-cylinder Lothario who knows how to operate on curves. Augie's wife can turn her"china-blue eyes on her husband like two gun barrels," but she loves him and they decide to make themselves a threesome by adopting a baby. It is not easy. Augie quickly learns that to meet an adoption agency's qualifications, he needs several virtues he does not possess. But what he finds so hard to adopt he finds deceptively easy to create--with a major assist from his mistress. The result is that Augie becomes a source of supply to the agency that has rejected him as a customer.

Augie's peccadillo reforms him. He is soon spending days in the unaccustomed pursuit of earning a living, and nights in his own bed. Before long, he qualifies for adoptive fatherhood. Then, to his horror, the agency gives him his own child. For a while poor Augie sees himself cast as a tragic Greek hero being buffeted by Fate, but a surprise ending enables him to become a normal, happy commuter buffeted only by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad.

Author De Vries, a writer for The New Yorker, has an acute sense of the absurd and an absurd way of being acute. He has written an amusing, screwball farce. Its moral: vice, in its mysterious ways, may lead a man to virtue-- and virtue may lead him to the brink of calamity.

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