I Hear America Swinging

BOOK DESCRIPTION

This isn't just another major novel. This is for readers who, having perhaps recently cruised in a number of such vehicular masterworks, might like a joyride in a jalopy. They will be whisked out along Iowa backroads to see the sexual revolution in full sway in what only yesterday was called the Bible Belt, with a marriage counselor named Bill Bumpers at the wheel, driving with the top down and the accelerator floored.

Wildly uncertain whether he is saving the demise, Dr. Bumpers nurses a rural union into ménage à trois, an that into a sort of updated Brook Farm commune, as hired men, shirtsleeve philosophers, and assorted other American folk archetypes Get With It. Using his familiar broad cartoon strokes, De Vries quickly sketches for us the utopia of total self-gratification we have been promised by rhapsodists urging us to scrap the work ethic along with the Puritan. Women's Lib is now a seminal (sic) force, and there is of course creative self-realization for all- the hired man turned primitive and critic is certainly one of the author's happier inspirations.

All this is orchestrated with our guide's own personal life, giving us stopovers at orgies, black masses, and what not as we wing our way merrily toward  1984 rather different from the one we had been fearing. By no means necessarily opposed to unfettered freedom, the author simply reminds us that the broader the front on which man pursues it, the greater his potential for absurdity. As Whitney Balliett long ago pointed out in The New Yorker, "De Vries, in a highly devious way, is battling both immorality and morality."

The title is taken from a hitherto unpublished poem of Whitman's unearthed in recent scholarly researches on the Master.

Peter De Vries (1910-1993). I Hear America Swinging, Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1976. 211pp.