'The Blood of the Lamb' is the chronicle of a life the protagonist himself describes as his 'Book of the Dead'. It is both humorous and tragic; the omnipresent reader a witness to Don Wanderhope's struggle to fathom belief, love, meaning, medicine, faith and suffering.

De Vries writes with a dazzling mastery of language and sentiment - it is a wonder and disappointment that he and his works aren't more esteemed. Semi-autobiographical, his character's journey bleeds perspicacity and authenticity, none more so than at its climax:

'How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progress. A vermin:..eaten saint scratching his filth in the hope of heaven is better off than you damned in clean linen. Progress doubles our tenure in a vale of tears. Man is a mistake, to be corrected only by his abolition, which he gives promise of seeing to himself. Oh, let him pass, and leave the earth to the flowers that carpet the earth wherever he explodes his triumphs. Man is inconsolable, thanks to that eternal "Why?" when there is no Why, that question mark twisted like a fishhook in the human heart.'

The Blood of the Lamb poignantly embodies the fragility of existence and the struggles within it to which we all succumb. ( )

Peter DeVries was a very popular writer who contributed many stories to the New Yorker in the fifties and sixties and who wrote several very funny novels. This autobiographical novel describes the growth to maturity of Don Wanderhope, member of a strictly Calvinist Dutch Reform family, whose brother becomes a heretic, whose father becomes addicted to drink and goes insane, and whose wife commits suicide after giving him a child whom he loves deeply. At age eleven, his daughter contracts leukemia, initially does quite well, but then succumbs to a staph infection in the hospital.

Wanderhope - I suspect the name is no accidental choice - in grief stricken anger rails against God and man. "I made a tentative conclusion. It seemed from all of this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration. Not going to the stars, but learning that one may stay where one is. It was shortly after the evening in question that I had a taste of that truth on a scale that enabled me to put my finger on it." The happiest moment of his life comes when the doctor lets him know that his daughter will be all right - a mistake as it turns out. "The fairy would not become a gnome. We could break bread in peace again, my child and I. The greatest experience open to man then, is the recovery of the commonplace."

The book has many humorous moments and profound insights, as Wanderhope struggles with religion as he tries to deal with the death of his only child. "I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which his own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race. Philosophy really can give us nothing permanent to believe in either. It is too rich in answers; each canceling out the rest. The quest for meaning is foredoomed. Human life means nothing. But that is not to say that it is not worth living. What does a Debussy arabesque mean, or a rainbow, or a rose? A man delights in all of these knowing himself to be no more. A wisp of music and haze of dreams dissolving against the sun. Man has only his own two feet to stand on his own human trinity to see him through: reason, courage and grace and the first plus the second equals the third." ( )

The first half and second halves of this book seem like entirely separate books - it took me a couple of chapters to get in this, printed 1961, with the old book smell and the weird stain and that font that was so popular midcentury that just invites skimming, but I'm glad I gave it the time. This book is gorgeous. It's a semi-autobiographical account of the author's struggles with religion over the course of his life, and it ends up being kind of a defense of the idea that not everything can or should be redeemed - "Time heals nothing - which should make us the better able to minister." The author seems to give up on the possibility of satisfaction, but he continues anyway. "'Let there be light,' we cry, and only the dawn breaks." Compassion is possible, it's beautiful, but it's all. We can never be consoled, and maybe the worst thing is the waste that goes into trying to console ourselves, or trying to convince ourselves that there is something to console us. But there's no point in being angry about that. We can bear our own witness. ( )

This was a book I started to read at the end of the last school year in June and had a really difficult time with because of the very personal nature of the subject matter. (The forward by Jeffrey Frank gets into this quite a bit, speaking about how De Vries was usually known for writing more comedic novels and how this is perhaps the closest he got to autobiography with his own life's tragedies.


But, to be fair, this book is really more balanced than I thought it would be. Most of the book doesn't dwell too much on tragedies and loss, though it begins and ends with it full circle. However, the middle is mainly filled with philosophizing about religion and medicine as well as the first person protagonist's womanizing and overall experiences being young and a little frivolous with life's experiences.


I think those who want a glimpse of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s and also who are curious to know what the religious and medical thinking was like in the area will not be disappointed. The conversations are just lengthy enough for a decent taste but not so lengthy that they get tedious.


Memorable Quotes:

pg. 110 "Death is the commonest thing in the universe."

pg. 111 "You believe what you must in order to stave off the conviction that it's all a tale told by an idiot."

pg. 117 "Ninety percent of the universe is missing."

pg. 208 "Prove to me there is a God and I will really begin to despair."

pg. 214 "Thus it seemed to me that what you were up against in Stein was not logic rampant, but frustrated faith. He could not forgive God for not existing."

pg. 220 "I sat mesmerized in my own seat, transfixed in perhaps the most amazing midnight I had ever lived through, yet one possessing, in the dreamy dislocations of whit it formed a part, a weird, bland naturalness like that of a Chirico landscape, full of shadows infinitely longer than the objects casting them."

pg. 228 "We will seek out the leaves turning in the little praised bushes and the unadvertised trees."

pg. 237 "It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate. The scattered particles of self-love, wood, thrush calling, homework sums, broken nerves, rag dolls, one Phi Beta Kappa key, gold stars, lamplight smiles, night cries, and the shambles of contemplation-are collected for a split moment like scraps of shrapnel before they explode."

( )