Novel: Reuben, Reuben

Overview
Peter De Vries' novel Reuben, Reuben follows Gowan McGland, a once-promising poet turned professional heckler and womanizer, as he lurches through a small New England town wrapped in cynicism and self-sabotage. The book is a dark comedy that mines both the gallows humor of McGland's rapid decline and the corrosive social dynamics of literary ambition, sexual entitlement, and the taste for clever cruelty. De Vries balances sharp, ribald wit with an underlying melancholy that makes the laughter uneasy.

Plot
Gowan arrives as a charismatic, verbally agile local celebrity whose greatest talent is his ability to disarm and wound with a quip. Rather than rebuild a serious practice, he drifts from affair to affair, from insult to insult, collecting admirers who mistake performance for authenticity. His personal life and reputation begin to fray as his drinking, self-deception, and appetite for attention push him into humiliating situations. Interactions with townspeople, lovers, and would-be champions reveal how quickly charm curdles into destructiveness, and the narrative moves toward episodes that blend slapstick embarrassment with moral collapse.

Main Character
Gowan McGland is magnetic, volatile, and unbearably witty, a man who confuses verbal prowess for creative achievement. His paradox, an intense desire to be admired coupled with an inability to sustain the discipline or humility that admiration demands, drives the novel. He is as funny as he is mean, and De Vries makes Gowan's barbed remarks both entertaining and morally suspect. Readers are constantly asked to decide whether to laugh with him, at him, or in spite of him, and that ambiguity makes Gowan one of De Vries' most memorable antiheroes.

Themes and Tone
The novel interrogates the vanity of literary life, the thin line between satire and cruelty, and the social economies that reward style over substance. De Vries examines how intellectuality can be weaponized into a defense against intimacy and responsibility, and how a community that indulges cleverness can enable self-destruction. The tone is relentlessly comic on the surface, full of quips, sly observations, and outrageous situations, but comedy here often functions as a veneer for sadness and ethical failure, creating an emotional dissonance that lingers.

Style and Legacy
De Vries' prose is nimble, laced with wordplay, epigrammatic insight, and a delight in the absurd. His sentences snap with the kind of verbal agility that mirrors Gowan's own bluster; yet beneath the surface jokes are carefully observed human miseries. Reuben, Reuben stands as a sharp example of mid-20th-century American comic fiction that can be as unkind as it is affectionate. The novel influenced later portrayals of the self-destructive artist and remains notable for its ability to be both ruthlessly funny and disturbingly honest about the costs of living by cleverness alone.