Peter De Vries has been called by Kingsley Amis "the funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic" and by W. J. Smith "the greatest punster the world has ever known." The author of a large number of popular and widely read novels,...

PETER DE VRIES is the funniest writer I have ever read. Typical is the discourse on total depravity in which De Vries reflects on his temptation as a youthful Calvinist to seek out a Catholic confessional, to enter "the cool seclusion of those...

LIKE THE cleaning lady," declares a character in a Peter De Vries novel, "we all come to dust." So, at last, has the novelist. The wildly comic writer died last month at age 83. Though the circumstances of his death are unknown to...

Dutch bank ABN Amro's decision to accept an $86.4 billion buyout offer from Barclays drew derision, including threats of a lawsuit, from shareholders on Thursday who want the bank to accept a potentially better bid from Royal Bank of Scotland.ABN Amro NV shareholders called on...

A Dutch court blocked ABN Amro's planned sale of a Chicago bank on Thursday, a ruling that makes it more likely a group led by Royal Bank of Scotland will capture ABN Amro in the industry's largest takeover battle.The court said ABN Amro must seek...

[But Who Wakes the Bugler?, De Vries's first published novel,] has a certain charm as a product of its time. And it is dated: not only is there a stage Negro, Jubal, who speaks in a thick dialect, but it's the man—Mr. Thwing—not his fiancée Hermina, who can't face up to matrimony. Now it's women who fear stifling. (p. 11) The novel is essentially formless, but there is some pattern supplied by Mr. Thwing's attempt to solve an apparent murder in the Chi...

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...

Kingsley Amis once remarked of Peter De Vries: "I would rate him the funniest serious writer on either side of the Atlantic." De Vries's humour derives not just from his remarkable capacity for word play, but from his ability to invent situations that invert the natural order of things…. De Vries's puns are ingenious enough to justify the elaborate situations often needed to set them up: in an early novel, for example, he has someone throwing stones at seabirds in order th...