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Slouching Towards Kalamazoo

By Peter De Vries

University of Chicago Press, 246 pages, $14 paper

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It’s North Dakota in 1963, and the hero is a sophisticated adolescent who reads Joyce and Eliot but repeats 8th grade when he is befuddled by facts. A tutor in the form of a “modern Hester Prynne” rescues the lad in this hilarious novel by the late, erudite and comic Peter De Vries.