Peter De Vries, whose reputation has fairly plummeted since his death in 1993, published two dozen novels over the course of his long career. But his best work belongs, in spirit, to the 1950s. His books are crowded with the properties and personnel of that decade – men in gray flannel suits riding commuter trains back home to their unemancipated wives, there to disport themselves in long evenings of alcohol and adultery. It is a familiar literary milieu, the target of gloomy fictional dissections ever since Updike and Cheever, and of righteous rebellion ever since Betty Friedan, but no one made more of its comedy than De Vries. He is more than the satirist of the postwar suburbs: He is their unleashed id, drowning propriety in a flood of puns and gags and cartoonish lusts.

Exactly because De Vries was not a native of that comfortable world – he was born in 1910 to a working-class Dutch immigrant family – his antennae were exquisitely tuned to the absurdities of haut-bourgeois life as lived in Westchester and Connecticut. Like Randall Jarrell in “Pictures From an Institution” and Mary McCarthy in “The Groves of Academe,” he was especially amused by the follies of “advanced” opinion, the tame radicalism of pseudo-intellectuals and would-be artists. Take, for example, De Vries’s sketch of Avalon, Conn., the setting of his reputation-making 1954 novel “The Tunnel of Love”:

There was an implication quite deeply rooted, namely that discomposure is the price of civilized subtlety, and freedom from it the boon of less evolved types. The neurotics were those oysters, so to speak, in whom the abrasive grain of sand had produced the pearl, Sensibility. I myself took this on faith; so that when the neurotics slung an arm around my shoulder, as they often did, and said they envied me my untortured simplicity, I had a feeling of resentment and chagrin. And when they referred to me as ‘levelheaded,’ ‘steady,’ ‘a good sort,’ it amounted to being called names.

Such moral topsy-turviness is one of the major ingredients of De Vries’s comedy, and it appears everywhere in the two books just now brought back into print by University of Chicago Press: “Slouching Towards Kalamazoo” (246 pages, $14), first published in 1983, and “The Blood of the Lamb” (246 pages, $14), which first appeared in 1961. In these short but crowded books, the reader will find a wife who gets drunk at a party, then gets angry at her husband for not getting angry with her (“Your own wife making a spectacle of her self. I’d be ashamed”); a groom who demands that his bride obey his wish not to include the word “obey” in the wedding service (“‘I’ll have no obedience around here!’ I said, banging the table. ‘Is that clear?'”); and a debate in which a minister and an atheist each convince the other about the (non)existence of God.

Even more than such reversals, however, De Vries loves the reversals of meaning found in puns. Samuel Johnson famously complained about Shakespeare’s love of puns, or quibbles: “A quibble is to Shakespeare what luminous vapours are to the traveller: he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way and sure to engulf him in the mire.” But when it comes to puns, De Vries makes Shakespeare look restrained. He is like a driver who will always swerve off the highway to follow a pun, even if it means plunging over the edge of a cliff.

If the groan is to the pun what the laugh is to the joke, De Vries’s reader is guaranteed to groan still more often than he laughs. In fact, De Vries is well aware that his relentless punning can seem like a kind of aggression: In “Slouching Towards Kalamazoo,” he introduces a character whose labored gags are always accompanied by a kick or shove to drive the punchline home. And the puns in just these two books are enough to leave the reader black and blue. A woman declares she won’t have children because it will ruin her figure, prompting her husband to reply: “Yeah, there is a destiny that ends our shapes.” An obtuse triangle is defined as “the dumb postmaster and his wife and that boarder they say is fooling around with her.” A scene at a tuberculosis sanitarium gives De Vries the pretext for “a case of conspicuous consumption.”

De Vries is always happy to shift a scene, stall a plot, or add a character in order to make room for more jokes; as in an opera, the point is not the story but the arias and ensembles that interrupt it. As a result, you can hardly do justice to a De Vries novel by summarizing it. “Slouching Towards Kalamazoo,” for instance, is the story of an eighth-grader who gets his teacher pregnant. But it does not have a trace of the tabloid melodrama the subject might suggest.

For Tony Thrasher, the precocious father who narrates the book, is a teenager in name only; he sounds and acts as grown up as the world-weary, hyper-literate, sex-obsessed protagonists of every other De Vries novel. (“I find it exciting to discover and explore divergent and even warring elements within myself, and exhilarating to pursue the adventure of synthesizing them into a coherent and viable whole, what I believe Eliot has called a balance of contrarieties,” the 15-year-old Thrasher declares.) Thrasher’s dilemma is just the thread on which De Vries strings a series of jokes, many of which have to do with the cultural changes of the early 1960s, when the action takes place.

But the 1960s – with the sexual revolution, the spread of pop psychology, and the advent of the T-shirt, all of which come in for De Vries’s mockery – is not this novelist’s native habitat, and “Slouching Towards Kalamazoo” never quite settles into the absurd groove of De Vries’s best books. His comedy, so much of which revolves around sex, flourishes best in the peculiar climate of the 1950s, when sexual mores were still caught between Freudian liberation and old-fashioned notions of respectability.

If the University of Chicago Press chose to reprint “Slouching Towards Kalamazoo,” rather than one of De Vries’s more completely successful novels, it is surely because its treatment of religious matters nicely complements the themes of “The Blood of the Lamb,” De Vries’s darkest and most morally serious book. “Slouching” approaches the question of belief in typically comic fashion – Thrasher’s father is the minister who gains a convert and loses his faith in a theological debate.

But “Blood,” De Vries’s most autobiographical novel, is compelled to be earnest about belief by its subject: the death of a 10-year-old girl from leukemia. Don Wanderhope’s loss of his daughter Carol is a barely disguised version of De Vries’s own loss of his daughter Emily, an unspeakable grief he writes about with calm precision. His description of a children’s hospital belongs to a world hitherto absent from De Vries’s fiction – a world that seems to annihilate the very possibility of comedy:

A mother [wheeled] a perambulator in which reposed a mummy with a sign pinned to its gown reading ‘Nothing by mouth’. … A priest blessed a lad in a wheel chair before trading taunts with him about the Dodgers as he moved off to other chores. Crawling toward us on all fours was an infant wearing a turban of surgical gauze, whom a passing nurse snatched up and returned to its crib.

Such horrors lead De Vries to reflect on his childhood faith, a severe Dutch Reformed Calvinism that believed unhesitatingly in predestination, original sin, and infant damnation. In using his essentially comic art, so prone to digressions and wisecracks, to grapple with these matters, De Vries often seems like a man trying to ride across the Sahara on a carousel horse. The undeniable power of “The Blood of the Lamb” lies not in De Vries’s deliberate effects, which often come across as melodramatic or contrived, but in his patient recording of facts. Most of his books offer delightful escapes from reality; this one insists on confronting it, and so attains something rarer than delight. With luck, a writer capable of producing both “Slouching Towards Kalamazoo” and “The Blood of the Lamb” will not remain unappreciated for long.