Never doubt the power of uncertainty, even in the darkest moments of life. Author Peter De Vries, having lost his daughter to childhood leukemia, dares to find the humor in the raw material of his own life to describe the fictional life of Don Wanderhope. Don (like De Vries) was reared in Calvinism and through education, reading, sexual awakening, and terrible luck becomes a buffeted and shell-shocked man, quietly resigned to the tragicomedy of life. Before early middle age, Don has buried his teenage brother, his lover, his wife, and his little girl. Of his daughter’s body, he observes: She looked finally like some mangled flower, or like a bird that had been pelted to earth in a storm. Like Ishmael, only Don survives to tell the tale of ruin and doubt. Don careens from despair to comedy, to faith, to doubt and to memory. “How I hate this world. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. 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. Don scorns theology, and he equates theologizing (the act of cramming the great mysteries of life into formulas) with playing God. To the question, “What would you do if you were God? Don answers, Put a stop to all this theology. Instead, Don would suggest his own rough-hewn idea of the Trinity. “Man has only his 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.” On the other hand, Don scorns the certainty of some atheists who take glee in tormenting and insulting believers. Don doubts both belief and unbelief. He is as skeptical of his doubt as he is of his faith. Where do these doubts come from? To Don, they are the shadows reaching out to declare him his father’s son; his brother’s brother; and his daughter’s father. Now through the meadows of my mind wander hand in hand [my brother, wife and daughter], saying, “My grace is sufficient for thee.” For we are indeed saved by grace in the end– but to give, not take. This, it seems then, is my Book of the Dead. All I know I have learned from [the Dead]. All I am worth I got from them. “The Blood of the Lamb” should be required reading for any priest or minister who wants to console the grieving. I believe it would also be helpful to readers with a religious background who might be grieving. Time heals nothing– which should make us the better able to minister. There may be griefs beyond the reach of solace, but none worthy of the name that does not set free the springs of sympathy. Blessed are they that comfort, for they too have mourned. Again the throb of compassion rather than the breath of consolation: the recognition of how long, how long is the mourners’ bench upon which we sit, arms linked in undeluded friendship, all of us, brief links, ourselves, in the eternal pity. I came to this book through a tortured path of my own, and it rests on my "altar bookshelf." I read it while undergoing a severe crisis. Then, years later, having put a little distance behind me and my own battles, I remembered it again, a few summers ago, when I learned that a tumor had snaked its way around the parotid gland of my 14-year old daughter. It took more than six weeks of anxiety and a seven-hour surgery to discover that the tumor was benign, but until that sweet relief, I did not think myself capable of enduring one more fishhook to the heart. Some people will never make devout atheists or devout believers. They have too much uncertainty. Were they to temporarily declare their allegiance to either camp, they would backslide fast. They know that, with nothing certain, anything is possible. Because of this doubt, they are outcasts from all entrenched sides of the theological wars between belief and unbelief. Some doubters need to hug “that little doubt that is so desperately needed today” --as De Vries calls it--“doubt, the ray of hope.” Go thy way, thy doubt hath made thee whole. *****P.S. Although my review does not capture it, this is a very funny book—a tragicomedy. I just was not up to demonstrating the humor. There are many laughs through the tears. Perhaps you will take my word on faith-- or just observe the pageant of life yourself, to know that this, like all else, is possible. August 13, 2013
"We live this life by a kind of conspiracy of grace: the common assumption, or pretense, that human existence is "good" or "matters" or has "meaning," a glaze of charm or humor by which we conceal from one another and perhaps even ourselves the suspicion that it does not, and our conviction in times of trouble that it is overpriced -- something to be endured rather than enjoyed. Nowhere does this function more than in precisely such a slice of hell as a Children's Pavilion, where the basic truths would seem to mock any state of mind other than rage and despair....carried about in the heart, but privately, to be let out on special occasions,like savage dogs for exercise, occasions in solitude when God is cursed, birds stoned from the trees or the pillow hammered in darkness."Peter De Vries. The Blood of the Lamb. reprinted by University of Chicago Press (2005) p.215.Decades before Irving's World According to Garp and its death of child, decades before Picoult's heart-breaking dilemmas, and decades before 'reality fiction,' or what I call voyeuristic nonfiction, Peter De Vries (1910-1993) produced this slim novel of less than 250 pages in 1961. University of Chicago has reprinted this novel and Slouching Towards Kalamazoo in 2005. Of all his writings, this novel is his most personal. De Vries would write more (voluminously) but none of his subsequent works would bear any dedications.I suspect that De Vries is a lost name to most readers today. Rather unfortunate. James Thurber begged and cajoled De Vries to join The New Yorker, where De Vries would hold sway and champion writers from 1944 to 1987. In addition to Thurber, De Vries counted John Hersey, J.D. Salinger, Robert Penn Warren amongst his friends and earned the praises of Kingsley Amis, Max Beerbohm, and Eveyln Waugh. He was for a time one of America's great humorists. Numerous De Vriesian witticisms have since passed into the American lexicon: "Deep down, he's shallow" is one example.There is that haggard euphemism that the clowns and the comedians amongst us are the ones who understand grief and sorrow better than the rest of us, using humor as both their fencing mask and foil. This slim novel with the Biblical title and intentional allusion is a father's comedic and tragic journey as he watches his daughter succumb to leukemia. De Vries wears the mask of one Don Wanderhope and with a name like that you know that De Vries was thinking of the allegorical writers, like Hawthorne, who questioned the fearful symmetry of good and evil in the wilderness.Emily De Vries did not go gentle into that good night at 10 years old. Reared in the Dutch Reformed faith De Vries rails with impotent fury against God (and his faith's Calvinist belief in predestination) in turns of phrases that recall King Lear. Every single page of this novel has a comic observation or powerful turn of phrase that would be the envy of any writer. What is there, he asks, but a "conspiracy of grace"?While the novel is sad, there is humor, a touch of Chopin's music, and wisdom. De Vries admonishes us to put aside Ego and Fear and love each other while we can because, whether the blood is on the door or not, Death will come, least expected and certainly uninvited.
Do You like book The Blood Of The Lamb (2005)?
I enjoyed this book but I will leave the review to James Calvin Schaap.Excerpt:I finished Peter De Vries's Blood of the Lamb last night, for the second time. I read it initially sometime in the Sixties, four or five years after it was published, at a time in my life when I loved the irreverence he wields at his tribe--the Dutch Reformed people into which he and I were both born. De Vries mocked us but good, for our silliness and the sometime idiocy of our piety....There is humor in Blood of the Lamb too, Don Wanderhope and his father, aboard their garbage truck, slowly sinking like the Titanic into the primordial ooze of some Chicago-land refuse pit. Scared to death, they break out with--what else?--the doxology.But far and away, Blood of the Lamb is not a funny novel--not at all, even though forty years ago, when I first read it, I thought it was a hoot. But then, I was a kid, a rebel chafing under the strictures of De Vries's own ethnic and religious heritage, a heritage in process of cataclysmic change. It was the Sixties, after all, and little, if any of our lives were left untouched by the seismic cultural shifts of the era. At twenty, I read Peter De Vries's Blood of the Lamb and laughed.Forty years later, I almost cried...
—Laryn
I think this is one of those books that would have read better in the era in which is was written. I picked it up on a tangential mention from John Green, who used it as some of his background reading (I think?) for The Fault in Our Stars--or maybe he read it in the course of his theology studies? Either way, I think this book would've been far stronger a read, for me, as a memoir, but can understand as much as I'm able why it was written as fiction, and thus published so shortly after the death of De Vries' own daughter, Emily, who died of leukemia in 1960 at age 10. I would imagine things were still brutally raw then. The beginning of the book reads a bit more like a satire, regarding the Dutch in Chicago and immigrant culture in general, and was fairly approachable. The latter part was much more interesting to me, because there was more...sharpness...to it, I'd say. I nearly returned the book to the library multiple times as I got bogged down in the first half to two thirds of the book, then resolutely plowed through till it got to Don's daughter Carol, who made Don as a character and the book in general much better.The focus of this book, however, is supposedly on man's relationship with God. I think this book would make an excellent addition to a reading list for an entry level philosophy class, or a Christian theology class, or something like that, and provide fodder for discussion. Reading it on my own, the religious stuff felt thrown in randomly, as a supposed thread with which to tie the book together, and a ragged thread it was. Partly, I couldn't be bothered to put the thought into the dilemma, and partly, I think the whole thing could have been tighter. I wish I knew more about the religious and political culture of the late 50s/early 60s; I think that would help the reading of this book. In short: not worth the read. Though I'm not exactly sorry I read it. The double meaning of the title is very well taken, too.
—Elizabeth
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."
—Kirstie
