Tunnel of Love [1954] uses most of the components of the enduring De Vries pattern: the world is suburbia, USA, and its characters the middle or upper-middle class who are materially advanced but are psychically and comically somewhat in arrears. Here, he introduced marriage—its demands and the flights from it—as one of his central subject matters; as well, De Vries discovers his comic narrator, who so often ostensibly observes the bizarre antics of his fellows but then finds himself gradually drawn into the events and a chagrining self-discovery and revelation….

Tunnel of Love is early, vintage De Vries and was followed in quick succession by a series of adept comic novels with alternating shades of darker tragicomedy. In Comfort Me With Apples (1956) and Tents of Wickedness (1959), he unwinds the complicated affairs of Chick Swallow, who, feeling confined and repressed by marriage, is drawn to the seeming comforts...