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Forever Panting
While struggling to hold on to his sanity, Stew Smackenfelt, a former Dutch Reformed Calvinist, becomes infatuated with his mother-in-law. The world knew Stew as a perennially unemployed actor, faithful husband to his unfaithful wife and a natural born fall guy. Little did his friends suspect the secret life he pursued.
- GenresFiction
284 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published June 1, 1973
1 person is currently reading
37 people want to read
About the author
Peter De Vries
54 books164 followersPeter De Vries is responsible for contributing to the cultural vernacular such witticisms as "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be" and "Deep down, he's shallow." He was, according to Kingsley Amis, "the funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic." “Quick with quips so droll and witty, so penetrating and precise that you almost don’t feel them piercing your pretensions, Peter De Vries was perhaps America’s best comic novelist not named Mark Twain. . .” (Sam McManis, Sacramento Bee).
His achievement seemed best appreciated by his fellow writers. Harper Lee, naming the great American writers, said, “Peter De Vries . . . is the Evelyn Waugh of our time". Anthony Burgess called De Vries “surely one of the great prose virtuosos of modern America.”
Peter De Vries was a radio actor in the 1930s, and editor for Poetry magazine from 1938 to 1944. During World War II he served in the U.S. Marines attaining the rank of Captain, and was seconded to the O.S.S., predecessor to the CIA.
He joined the staff of The New Yorker magazine at the insistence of James Thurber and worked there from 1944 to 1987. A prolific writer, De Vries wrote short stories, reviews, poetry, essays, a play, novellas, and twenty-three novels, several of which were made into films.
De Vries met his wife, Katinka Loeser, while at Poetry magazine. They married and moved to Westport, Connecticut, where they raised 4 children. The death of his 10-year-old daughter Emily from leukemia inspired The Blood of the Lamb, the most poignant and the most autobiographical of De Vries's novels.
In Westport, De Vries formed a lifelong friendship with the young J. D. Salinger, who later described the writing process as "opening a vein and bleeding onto the page." The two writers clearly "understood each other very well” (son Derek De Vries in "The Return of Peter De Vries", Westport Magazine, April 2006).
De Vries received an honorary degree in 1979 from Susquehanna University, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 1983.
His books were sadly out of print by the time of his death. After the New Yorker published a critical reappraisal of De Vries’ work however (“Few writers have understood literary comedy as well as De Vries, and few comic novelists have had his grasp of tragedy”), The University of Chicago Press began reissuing his works in 2005, starting with The Blood of the Lamb and Slouching Toward Kalamazoo.
His achievement seemed best appreciated by his fellow writers. Harper Lee, naming the great American writers, said, “Peter De Vries . . . is the Evelyn Waugh of our time". Anthony Burgess called De Vries “surely one of the great prose virtuosos of modern America.”
Peter De Vries was a radio actor in the 1930s, and editor for Poetry magazine from 1938 to 1944. During World War II he served in the U.S. Marines attaining the rank of Captain, and was seconded to the O.S.S., predecessor to the CIA.
He joined the staff of The New Yorker magazine at the insistence of James Thurber and worked there from 1944 to 1987. A prolific writer, De Vries wrote short stories, reviews, poetry, essays, a play, novellas, and twenty-three novels, several of which were made into films.
De Vries met his wife, Katinka Loeser, while at Poetry magazine. They married and moved to Westport, Connecticut, where they raised 4 children. The death of his 10-year-old daughter Emily from leukemia inspired The Blood of the Lamb, the most poignant and the most autobiographical of De Vries's novels.
In Westport, De Vries formed a lifelong friendship with the young J. D. Salinger, who later described the writing process as "opening a vein and bleeding onto the page." The two writers clearly "understood each other very well” (son Derek De Vries in "The Return of Peter De Vries", Westport Magazine, April 2006).
De Vries received an honorary degree in 1979 from Susquehanna University, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 1983.
His books were sadly out of print by the time of his death. After the New Yorker published a critical reappraisal of De Vries’ work however (“Few writers have understood literary comedy as well as De Vries, and few comic novelists have had his grasp of tragedy”), The University of Chicago Press began reissuing his works in 2005, starting with The Blood of the Lamb and Slouching Toward Kalamazoo.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 25, 2008
Possibly the best, the funniest, the wisest piece of comic fiction written in the late 20th century. An out-of-work actor with a crisis of self-confidence divorces his wife and marries his mother-in-law. Then tries to get it all undone. Brilliant!
If you don't laugh harder than you ever have in your life at the last scene, you are not reading where you should be. Between the lines!
If you don't laugh harder than you ever have in your life at the last scene, you are not reading where you should be. Between the lines!
March 15, 2016
Always delightful, De Vries continues to be one of our most underrated writers.
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April 13, 2019My heart tells me that Forever Panting is a well written, funny and at times charmingly whimsical farce. My head tells me that it misses the mark for numerous (personal?) reasons. It could be that it's a book of its time (1973), that its required audience is of a certain vintage now and that being an American might help make it an easier read but all too often I found that I was losing track of sentences halfway through them. Peter De Vries' writing style often threw me like some bucking bronco. Curiously this only seemed to happen at the start of the book. Maybe Stew Smackenfelt (our lead) was just too much for me but the run-on sentences and the occasional references to things I had no knowledge of made the beginning a bigger challenge than I was expecting.
What I got out of the book was some wonderful recurring jokes and character quirks. When the book gets to its silliest it starts to wind down nicely and the underlying message about people dealing with people and dealing with themselves as people breaks through the cloud of ridiculousness. At times saucy, manic and often verging on mean spirited, but never quite falling into it, the tale does a good job of not succumbing to the full salaciousness of its synopsis (though it does just enough to titillate) and it definitely has more memorable than unmemorable parts. In many ways the book feels to me like the reviews of the play featured in the book. It "Just misses.", at least for me anyway.
What I got out of the book was some wonderful recurring jokes and character quirks. When the book gets to its silliest it starts to wind down nicely and the underlying message about people dealing with people and dealing with themselves as people breaks through the cloud of ridiculousness. At times saucy, manic and often verging on mean spirited, but never quite falling into it, the tale does a good job of not succumbing to the full salaciousness of its synopsis (though it does just enough to titillate) and it definitely has more memorable than unmemorable parts. In many ways the book feels to me like the reviews of the play featured in the book. It "Just misses.", at least for me anyway.
November 16, 2017
When have a book on your To Be Read pile for 40 years, it's inevitable that you will ask yourself why you didn't read it sooner when you finally get around to it. And it will have dated a bit. You realize it would have been an even better book had you read it 40 years earlier.
Peter DeVries achieved a reputation as being a sort of American Kingsley Amis. The same kind of humor, but Amis doesn't make me laugh like DeVries does. Might be a cultural thing or maybe I haven't read the tight Amis book yet. Anyway there are many funny moments in Forever Panting. I kept saying to myself, "Brilliant!"
Peter DeVries achieved a reputation as being a sort of American Kingsley Amis. The same kind of humor, but Amis doesn't make me laugh like DeVries does. Might be a cultural thing or maybe I haven't read the tight Amis book yet. Anyway there are many funny moments in Forever Panting. I kept saying to myself, "Brilliant!"
March 28, 2018
I used to read George Will, back when he was still sane, and he used to rave about DeVries. So I read this book and maybe one more before I realized it wasn't my kind of fiction. Funny and witty but pure fluff in the end.
October 4, 2013
*In my "reviews," I tend to type in quotations that I like. Were I to do that here, I'd be typing in the first several pages.
“ ‘Heppy seffy,’ I said, employing a locution that was one of her mother’s more reliable ardor-dampeners” (30).
“Well, the fact was that under all this sexual excitement one’s Johnson was up; so that proving one was a man had really better wait a moment till one was in a less virile state” (41).
“He gave her his Barrymore leer, as though accusing her of trafficking in paradox when she should be up in the kitchen fixing his breakfast” (42).
“...but also uring mature acceptance of the absurd, the idea that a touch of surrealism in everyday life--say a bit of motoring apparel discovered one morning in a kettle of legumes--may be precisely what one needs to start off another round of existence so remorselessly humdrum, so bottomlessly, irreducibly, plain out-and-out goddam uckingfay--” (43).
“Women are always saving their husbands’ faces, as though they are lengths of twine to be kept for some future use, perhaps not at the moment visualized” (47).
“There are times when breakfast seems the one thing worth getting up for, until you can climb back into the sack again and awaken dreaming of hot muffins and ham and eggs once more. Everything between downhill. The group on the train, the bunch at the office, people incidentally encountered in the course of the day? Forget it. And yet people seem glad to see one another. They get together. Rum bunch, people” (49).
“...I was once more ravenous, my stomach was at the same time upset. There were prolonged rumblings down in there, like pocketed poolballs traveling along the runways into the rack” (52).
“She often conferred an element of profundity, or at any rate resonance, on what she had just said by pausing in mid-utterance and calling it into question, thus shedding grave doubts on its validity” (54).
“...batting eyes that, so far from resembling truffles, glittered, according to the mirror again unintentionally run foul of there, with an almost morbidly metallic brightness, like blown fuses in which pennies have been inserted to make them operative, at least for the time being” (55-56).
“Smackenfelt set his coffee mug down on a table in a manner illustrating the leisure with which the truth had dawned on him, yet also the deliberation with which he would now respond. ‘Why, you son of a bitch. What a nasty crack’” (75).
“ ‘Lady, you’ve got to stop it,’ he whispered, his head lowered over the table, a hand to his brow. He seemed to be admonishing his beans” (95).
“...as they said in Chicago and possibly broader segments of the Middle West” (120).
“Hostesses didn’t mind his party-hopping, since he flitted from one to the other carrying the pollen of gossip” (120).
“Smackenfelt looked down at the Virgin Mary, the unsledged coconut, and the mixing bowl on the oily floor. He still had the hammer in his hand. He transferred his scrutiny from the coconut to Zap’s skull, hefting the hammer slightly” (127).
“He particularly went to town on the exercise called ‘walking on your buttocks.’ He took many such strolls on his long-suffering and belabored bottom behind the closed and even locked door…” (143). *He ends up with a horrible splinter.
“...gamins if you will (they didn’t have a gamin quality, they were just gamins)...” (144).
“ ‘People rarely do what they don’t want to. We may amaze each other, but we never surprise ourselves’”(155).
“He said, ‘A Critic is like a eunuch. He can’t do it himself but he can tell others how it’s done’” (255).
“It was like a drawing-room comedy, were we not in the dining room, and plastering that with all manner of refuse” (267).
“ ‘Let’s once and for all stop lacerating ourselves and each other. We’re not Dostoievsky characters’” (271).
“ ‘Heppy seffy,’ I said, employing a locution that was one of her mother’s more reliable ardor-dampeners” (30).
“Well, the fact was that under all this sexual excitement one’s Johnson was up; so that proving one was a man had really better wait a moment till one was in a less virile state” (41).
“He gave her his Barrymore leer, as though accusing her of trafficking in paradox when she should be up in the kitchen fixing his breakfast” (42).
“...but also uring mature acceptance of the absurd, the idea that a touch of surrealism in everyday life--say a bit of motoring apparel discovered one morning in a kettle of legumes--may be precisely what one needs to start off another round of existence so remorselessly humdrum, so bottomlessly, irreducibly, plain out-and-out goddam uckingfay--” (43).
“Women are always saving their husbands’ faces, as though they are lengths of twine to be kept for some future use, perhaps not at the moment visualized” (47).
“There are times when breakfast seems the one thing worth getting up for, until you can climb back into the sack again and awaken dreaming of hot muffins and ham and eggs once more. Everything between downhill. The group on the train, the bunch at the office, people incidentally encountered in the course of the day? Forget it. And yet people seem glad to see one another. They get together. Rum bunch, people” (49).
“...I was once more ravenous, my stomach was at the same time upset. There were prolonged rumblings down in there, like pocketed poolballs traveling along the runways into the rack” (52).
“She often conferred an element of profundity, or at any rate resonance, on what she had just said by pausing in mid-utterance and calling it into question, thus shedding grave doubts on its validity” (54).
“...batting eyes that, so far from resembling truffles, glittered, according to the mirror again unintentionally run foul of there, with an almost morbidly metallic brightness, like blown fuses in which pennies have been inserted to make them operative, at least for the time being” (55-56).
“Smackenfelt set his coffee mug down on a table in a manner illustrating the leisure with which the truth had dawned on him, yet also the deliberation with which he would now respond. ‘Why, you son of a bitch. What a nasty crack’” (75).
“ ‘Lady, you’ve got to stop it,’ he whispered, his head lowered over the table, a hand to his brow. He seemed to be admonishing his beans” (95).
“...as they said in Chicago and possibly broader segments of the Middle West” (120).
“Hostesses didn’t mind his party-hopping, since he flitted from one to the other carrying the pollen of gossip” (120).
“Smackenfelt looked down at the Virgin Mary, the unsledged coconut, and the mixing bowl on the oily floor. He still had the hammer in his hand. He transferred his scrutiny from the coconut to Zap’s skull, hefting the hammer slightly” (127).
“He particularly went to town on the exercise called ‘walking on your buttocks.’ He took many such strolls on his long-suffering and belabored bottom behind the closed and even locked door…” (143). *He ends up with a horrible splinter.
“...gamins if you will (they didn’t have a gamin quality, they were just gamins)...” (144).
“ ‘People rarely do what they don’t want to. We may amaze each other, but we never surprise ourselves’”(155).
“He said, ‘A Critic is like a eunuch. He can’t do it himself but he can tell others how it’s done’” (255).
“It was like a drawing-room comedy, were we not in the dining room, and plastering that with all manner of refuse” (267).
“ ‘Let’s once and for all stop lacerating ourselves and each other. We’re not Dostoievsky characters’” (271).
September 26, 2012
I’ve been a huge fan of De Vries for a long time, and I’m always surprised to see that no one really reads him. (This book had a whopping 14 reviews?!) His books are always short, witty, full of irony, satirical (if you “get” the satire of a 50’s New York Commuter lifestyle premise full of out-of-date references), and amusing. I blew through about 5-8 of these and then – I don’t know if my attraction to him hit a plateau or if my selections just stopped “hitting,” but the past 2 or 3 have been so-so.
I actually added this to my collection because another fellow De Vries lover described this as the funniest thing he had read, his favorite by far. And I must say I was quite disappointed. This one didn’t really do a whole lot for me. I found myself kinda bored at times, struggling through 20 pages a night. It seemed like it was all over the place – joke-wise, plot-wise, character-wise, structure-wise. The first chapter was in the first person, a guy talking about his Id, giving it a name, talking about how it’s struggling to take over. Then the second chapter is in the third person, talking about the man and his wife. Then we see that he has an attraction to his mother-in-law. OK, I guess, here’s the love-sex satire… but then it goes on and on with their lifestyle with no real send-ups, nothing too funny, no real lampooning…. four chapters later it returns to the first person… there’s our guy and a neighbor threatening to “take it outside” and fist-fight in the mud due to a Saturday night insult (didn’t I just read this in a different De Vries?). Then the plot shifts to focus on his wife writing plays and hitting it off with her producer, and our guy deals with a weight problem. The couple splits, blah blah blah, she’s with the guy who fist-fought her husband, he’s with her mother, yet they’re all four still friends… It was just too weird, too random, not really what I was led to believe would be “quality De Vries satire.” And his usually heavy-handedness with language doesn’t normally get in the way of the reading; here I felt like it did, like he was using big words in a thesaurus just to create the most intricate sentences he could think of rather than focus on telling a smooth story. He would spend 20 pages talking about our guy sitting in the basement, daydreaming, eating a sandwhich, and then to a single sentence to begin the next chapter, De Vries would shift gears and segue by announcing “Well, now they were apart and our guy married her mother. So…. “ I usually have multiple laugh-out-loud moments and I don’t think I had a one, I just wanted to finish.
I was thinking a two-star rating all the way, but upon finishing it and thinking about it, now I’m wondering if I should bump it up to a three. It was still mildly amusing. And I guess the random plot shifts did all come together in the end. But it wasn’t as irony-filled, completely unexpected and hilarious like it usually is. I saw it coming, didn’t really buy it, and thought the climaxing scene was pretty lame and unbelievable. I guess it’s a decent book, but I didn’t really enjoy reading it that much, so 2 it is.
I actually added this to my collection because another fellow De Vries lover described this as the funniest thing he had read, his favorite by far. And I must say I was quite disappointed. This one didn’t really do a whole lot for me. I found myself kinda bored at times, struggling through 20 pages a night. It seemed like it was all over the place – joke-wise, plot-wise, character-wise, structure-wise. The first chapter was in the first person, a guy talking about his Id, giving it a name, talking about how it’s struggling to take over. Then the second chapter is in the third person, talking about the man and his wife. Then we see that he has an attraction to his mother-in-law. OK, I guess, here’s the love-sex satire… but then it goes on and on with their lifestyle with no real send-ups, nothing too funny, no real lampooning…. four chapters later it returns to the first person… there’s our guy and a neighbor threatening to “take it outside” and fist-fight in the mud due to a Saturday night insult (didn’t I just read this in a different De Vries?). Then the plot shifts to focus on his wife writing plays and hitting it off with her producer, and our guy deals with a weight problem. The couple splits, blah blah blah, she’s with the guy who fist-fought her husband, he’s with her mother, yet they’re all four still friends… It was just too weird, too random, not really what I was led to believe would be “quality De Vries satire.” And his usually heavy-handedness with language doesn’t normally get in the way of the reading; here I felt like it did, like he was using big words in a thesaurus just to create the most intricate sentences he could think of rather than focus on telling a smooth story. He would spend 20 pages talking about our guy sitting in the basement, daydreaming, eating a sandwhich, and then to a single sentence to begin the next chapter, De Vries would shift gears and segue by announcing “Well, now they were apart and our guy married her mother. So…. “ I usually have multiple laugh-out-loud moments and I don’t think I had a one, I just wanted to finish.
I was thinking a two-star rating all the way, but upon finishing it and thinking about it, now I’m wondering if I should bump it up to a three. It was still mildly amusing. And I guess the random plot shifts did all come together in the end. But it wasn’t as irony-filled, completely unexpected and hilarious like it usually is. I saw it coming, didn’t really buy it, and thought the climaxing scene was pretty lame and unbelievable. I guess it’s a decent book, but I didn’t really enjoy reading it that much, so 2 it is.
December 13, 2009
I'm often unsure whether I am the barometeter of the book, measuring its meaning and successes, or whether the book is the barometer of me, measuring my capacities and moods.
If I am the barometer, I worry that I may be miscalibrated. Given five stars to work with on Goodreads or Netflix, I almost always want to split stars, not because my judgment is so nusanced but because two seems parsimonious for a book you read all the way through, and three seems (according to Netflix, anyway) to mean I really liked it. But I almost always have reservations. Should we, friends, insist on a ten-star system, to be universally adopted by international treaties?
By the way, I realize that the book and I may both be barometers, working out our mutual readings of each other in some dumb dialectic, but I'm not going there except to say that either the book got better or my mood improved or both.
I bought it second hand at the Book Stop because I was looking for a De Vries as an example of erudite humor. (He wrote for the New Yorker and he is witty and engaging, quick with a quip.) I needed relief from Armenian Genocide and Herta Muller's Land of the Green Plums. And I wanted to learn a little about writing humor into fiction--writing it into fiction rather than writing fiction that is humorous--and couldn't find any guides to that.
I was a little disappointed in the book. It is witty and erudite as I expected. Was it funny? Did it lighten my mood? I laughed (even OL) sometimes, and it lightened my mood in the sense that it was light reading and did not depress me. The POV character (who is, as his own Ego, sometimes the narrator, a conceit that did not further anything that I could see)is an actor of very limited success. He repeatedly invests imaginary parts for himself. Or finds roles thrust on him as he did one day in the automat, where he is mistaken for a priest by a penitent who wishes to confess.
I guess fiction humor must be about personal or social flaws, satire in the latter case. I guess the flaws cannot be either too guilty or too innocent, because we have to laugh at them. Or at the words used to let us know they are funny and not tragic. De Vries has the words and sometimes its the words that tickle your funny bone. And not just the words--sometimes it's the surprising twist or action or charcter. So why was I a little disappointed?
Maybe because I didn't learn the trick of humor writing. But maybe something else. What I've come away with so far are a couple of questions I want to think about. I reserve the right to have an epiphany later without letting anyone in on it.
Does extended humor fiction also require some elements that are not treated lightly? A revised form of that question might be: must there be some solid realistic fiction it it?
And is extended humor even possible or must it be brief?
Insights on humor, verbal, situational, or others, are welcome. Say anything. I'm a tyro and can learn from the simplest things.
If I am the barometer, I worry that I may be miscalibrated. Given five stars to work with on Goodreads or Netflix, I almost always want to split stars, not because my judgment is so nusanced but because two seems parsimonious for a book you read all the way through, and three seems (according to Netflix, anyway) to mean I really liked it. But I almost always have reservations. Should we, friends, insist on a ten-star system, to be universally adopted by international treaties?
By the way, I realize that the book and I may both be barometers, working out our mutual readings of each other in some dumb dialectic, but I'm not going there except to say that either the book got better or my mood improved or both.
I bought it second hand at the Book Stop because I was looking for a De Vries as an example of erudite humor. (He wrote for the New Yorker and he is witty and engaging, quick with a quip.) I needed relief from Armenian Genocide and Herta Muller's Land of the Green Plums. And I wanted to learn a little about writing humor into fiction--writing it into fiction rather than writing fiction that is humorous--and couldn't find any guides to that.
I was a little disappointed in the book. It is witty and erudite as I expected. Was it funny? Did it lighten my mood? I laughed (even OL) sometimes, and it lightened my mood in the sense that it was light reading and did not depress me. The POV character (who is, as his own Ego, sometimes the narrator, a conceit that did not further anything that I could see)is an actor of very limited success. He repeatedly invests imaginary parts for himself. Or finds roles thrust on him as he did one day in the automat, where he is mistaken for a priest by a penitent who wishes to confess.
I guess fiction humor must be about personal or social flaws, satire in the latter case. I guess the flaws cannot be either too guilty or too innocent, because we have to laugh at them. Or at the words used to let us know they are funny and not tragic. De Vries has the words and sometimes its the words that tickle your funny bone. And not just the words--sometimes it's the surprising twist or action or charcter. So why was I a little disappointed?
Maybe because I didn't learn the trick of humor writing. But maybe something else. What I've come away with so far are a couple of questions I want to think about. I reserve the right to have an epiphany later without letting anyone in on it.
Does extended humor fiction also require some elements that are not treated lightly? A revised form of that question might be: must there be some solid realistic fiction it it?
And is extended humor even possible or must it be brief?
Insights on humor, verbal, situational, or others, are welcome. Say anything. I'm a tyro and can learn from the simplest things.
May 11, 2015
4.9
Peter de Vries' Sauce for the Goose lured me to his witty and verbose style, with which he crafts absurd characters who undergo mildly realistic suburban 'quests'. The characters in Forever Panting are similarly clownish, but de Vries' style here is simply obnoxious. It is unclear whether de Vries is a mechanical genius or a complete hack - regardless, Forever Panting was only enjoyable when each individual sentence was considered as a completely separate entity. As a whole, Forever Panting simply feels like a smorgasbord of bafoonery, of poetic pretension, of computational error. Scenes such as the intense Boris Karloff vs. Ginger are very refreshingly written, but the whole ordeal with that ridiculous corn mascot is simply dulling.
Peter de Vries' Sauce for the Goose lured me to his witty and verbose style, with which he crafts absurd characters who undergo mildly realistic suburban 'quests'. The characters in Forever Panting are similarly clownish, but de Vries' style here is simply obnoxious. It is unclear whether de Vries is a mechanical genius or a complete hack - regardless, Forever Panting was only enjoyable when each individual sentence was considered as a completely separate entity. As a whole, Forever Panting simply feels like a smorgasbord of bafoonery, of poetic pretension, of computational error. Scenes such as the intense Boris Karloff vs. Ginger are very refreshingly written, but the whole ordeal with that ridiculous corn mascot is simply dulling.
June 15, 2009
Witty, comical piece from a Calvin graduate, recommended by Dr. Pastoor.
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September 23, 2017 A very interesting novel which lives up to its blurb claims that DeVries is one of the funniest serious novelists of his era. The sexual revolution, changing partners, performing selves, the role of art intertwined with the role of advertising. Who is the self? All delivered with slapstick comedy, including a marvellous house-trashing scene.
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