This image is the cover for the book Tunnel of Love

Tunnel of Love

A comic novel of ambition and infidelity in the suburbs by “the funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic” (Kinglsey Amis).

Harking from the golden age of fiction that skewered the middle-class American dream—the school of John Updike and John Cheever—this novel by the author of Slouching Towards Kalamazoo looks with laughter upon the lawns, cocktails, and creature comforts of suburbia, as well as the antics and anxieties that lurk just beneath its manicured facade. De Vries’s classic situation comedy The Tunnel of Love follows the interactions of a socially insecure, pun-loving family man, an officious lady caseworker from an adoption agency, and a chauvinist pig—all of whom are neighbors who know far too much about one another’s private lives.

In this farcical tale of marital quibbles, De Vries employs his verbal fluidity and singular gift for wordplay to offer readers “his Scarlet Letter, in which adultery leads not to a consciousness of sin and repentance but to a neurotic guilt and the delicious enjoyment it affords” (D.G. Myers, from the introduction).

Peter De Vries, D. G. Myers

Peter De Vries (1910–1993) was born in Chicago to Dutch immigrant parents. His father wanted him to join the clergy, but after attending Calvin College and Northwestern University, De Vries found work as a vending-machine operator, a toffee-apple salesman, a radio actor, and an editor at Poetry magazine. His friend and mentor James Thurber brought him to the attention of the New Yorker, and in 1944 De Vries moved to New York to become a regular staff contributor to the magazine, where he worked for the next forty years.
A prolific author of novels, short stories, parodies, poetry, and essays, he published twenty-seven books during his lifetime and was heralded by Kingsley Amis as the “funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic.” De Vries was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983, taking his place alongside Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, and S. J. Perelman as one of the nation’s greatest wits. 

The University of Chicago Press