Books in Brief: Sauce for the Goose

Sauce for the Goose, by Peter De Vries (Little, Brown, 232 pp., $11.95). Peter De Vries’s new book, like its 19 predecessors, is a madly funny, slightly chaotic charge on yet another shaky outpost of the common wisdom—in this case, the Women’s Lib crusade against on-the-job sexual harassment. The plot is simple, sort of: Roberta Diesel of Femme magazine (yes, you heard right) sends her old college chum Daisy Dobbin into the offices of Metropole, another magazine, to do undercover research for an exposé on office hankypanky, with special emphasis on the noontime exploits of one Dog Bokum, a male nymphomaniac in the makeup department who is so depraved he thinks Playboy glorifies women. Things go downhill—fast—from there. Of course, the real subject of this amiably preposterous farrago of a novel is the war between men and women, and this latest installment of Mr. De Vries’s long-running commentary on that most inexhaustible of topics is a crazed gem from start to finish. If S. J. Perelman had been a lapsed Calvinist with a knack for getting from one chapter to the next . . . well, he might have written Sauce for the Goose. Read it and weep.