"She would be sitting at the window, eating fruit out of the hubcap." That's the kind of sentence you run across in a Peter De Vries novel—if one can give that name to an extended prose work that has no plot (just situations) and no characterizations (just tics and funny lines). De Vries's books are like giant towers of nougat—agglutinations of puns, metaphors, literary allusions, old songs, snapshots of people behaving, by their lights, in a perfectly reasonable manner. On this page, you hit on a tasty bit with a soft liquid center; on another, you chip off a piece of your mind. (p. 38)

For De Vries, a story is just an excuse to pour on the jokes, lots of thick sauce over a little bit of meat. But most of the jokes are pretty good….

[In Sauce for the Goose De Vries occasionally] bruises our...