THE WHOLE KIT AND CABOODLE:
LANGUAGE AS IRONY IN THOMAS BERGER’S
NEIGHBORS AND SNEAKY PEOPLE

"It ought to begin to occur to you that life is just a collection of stories from all points of self-interest." This excellent advice comes from Carlo Reinhart’s harridanish ex-wife, Genevieve, and, as is true of most good advice received by a character in a Thomas Berger novel, has no effect: there are some truths beyond the ken of even the enlightened and triumphant Reinhart of Reinhart’s Women (1981), Berger’s eleventh novel. And it is characteristic that Berger leaves to one of his least sympathetic characters the opportunity to spell out one of the central assumptions of his writing, combining as it does Berger’s constant theme, language, with his predominant technique, irony. Of course, theme and technique are really one and the same in a Berger novel, particularly since the difference between word and object, between language and reality, gives rise to the fundamental irony which all twelve of his novels explore.

Ironies abound on many levels in Berger’s novels, variously accounting for much of the wry humor in his characters’ misadventures and for much of the cheerful self-reflexivity of his unique style. Perhaps the best description of his relentlessly ironic method comes from Berger himself, who, despite the prominent and pervasive humor of his novels, has expressed understandable dismay at being described as a "comic" writer:

If somebody picks up one of my books and laughs, or whatever he does, that’s all right with me, but I don’t like to build up comic expectations. Indeed, I am ironic, by which I mean I endeavor to show how things are as opposed to what they are generally thought to be. I am, in fact, so ironic that often I pursue the inquiry until it turns back and reveals that which has been exposed as illusion or delusion is actually true.¹

The young Reinhart of Crazy in Berlin (1958) glosses this assessment with his own view of irony as

that means to confront the ideal with the actual and not go mad, that whip which produced the pain that hurts-so-good, so that in the measure to which it hurt it was also funny. Finally, having flogged and laughed yourself to the rim of death’s trench, you looked within and saw irony’s own irony: the last truth was the first.²

While I grow ever more leery of trying to identify first, much less last, truths in Berger’s delightfully perplexing novels, it seems to me that any systematic consideration of his work must wrestle with the all-encompassing nature of his irony, the primary characteristic of which is a kind of "layeredness" that might be compared to the layers of skin of an onion, if only those layers were somehow capable of dialectical relationships with each other. By this I mean that layers or levels of irony in Berger’s novels should be seen not just as identifying technique, but as both the structuring principle of his work and a key to its philosophical resonance. To suggest both the intricacy and the continuity of the role irony plays in Berger’s writing, I want to consider in some detail two very different-seeming novels: Sneaky People, published in 1975, and Neighbors, published in 1980.

In one of the anomalies that have always clustered around Berger’s career, Neighbors, his tenth and in many ways most complex novel, has become one of his best known—not by virtue of the almost unanimously glowing reviews it received, but by virtue of its being made into a movie for the comedy team of Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi.³ Sneaky People, however, is one of those Berger novels that seems to have been relegated to the shadow of Little Big Man, where it waits, quietly biding its time. As is true of any two of Berger’s novels, these two books seem almost manically dissimilar, but as is also true of any two of his novels, they share much more than is at first apparent. Both are wonderfully funny initiation novels, the ironies of both novels are primarily structured by Berger’s fascination with language, and in both cases, the resulting humor frames, but does not temper Berger’s uncompromising view of life. And it seems to me that his twelfth and most recent work, The Feud (1983), falls heir to the tradition and spirit of these two novels, its rich colloquial sound much like that of Sneaky People, its inexorably determined and deteriorating situations like those in Neighbors.

Sneaky People is Berger’s seventh and, with the possible exception of Reinhart’s Women, his most gentle novel, notwithstanding the fact that much of its action concerns plans for a murder. The novel chronicles the coming of an age of a fifteen-year-old boy, Ralph Sandifer, in a dreamy small-town-world where nothing is nearly as bucolic as it seems and all situations are heavily ironic. Given the scheme of Berger’s novels as "celebrations" of classic genres, Sneaky People almost has to

be a tribute to Booth Tarkington’s Penrod or Seventeen, but this is a story of several different kinds of initiations and its focus is divided among five adult characters in addition to Ralph. Ralph’s father, Buddy, owns a used-car lot and plans to have one of his employees murder Ralph’s mother. Naomi, the drab, mousey-seeming mother secretly writes and sells pornography, trading on her knowledge that "because sexual congress was ludicrous in life, its depiction must necessarily follow suit, nay, go it more than one better if interest were to be provoked from the reader, who having come into the world with genitals was himself a born clown."⁴ Contrasted with Naomi’s imagination of preposterous sex is the considerable experience of Laverne, Buddy’s mistress, a good-natured sometime-whore and full-time pragmatist. Another of Buddy’s employees, Leo Kirsch, knows women only through his long-suffering submission to a domineering and hypochondriac mother ("You missed it, Leo. . . . You missed my hemorrhage.") and through his fantasy letters to young girls pictured in the newspaper. In fact, Sneaky People presents quite a catalogue of possible male/female relationships, almost all of which are primarily structured by misunderstanding—both of the self and of others. Consequently, most of the humor of the novel rises from situations that deflate the hypostatized rhetorical worlds which each character has come up with to make sense of or to mask the reality of his or her life. Finally, Berger’s characters are "sneaky" simply because they are human and their secrets nothing more nor less than the inherent condition of their existence. As D. Keith Mano so aptly noted in his review of Sneaky People, Berger "prefers the padded bra in all of us."⁵

Apart from the humor of its situations, this book creates a steady background of genial vernacular banter, a world of familiar but now-neglected colloquial commonplaces, exclamations, and retorts. As much or more than even Little Big Man, this is a book that reveals that Berger should be acclaimed for his ear as well as his "vision." He has described Sneaky People as his "tribute to the American languge of 1939—to be philologically precise, that of the lower-middle class in the eastern Middle West, on which I am an authority as on nothing else." He explains:

American English had its great flowering in the 1920s and 30s, lay dormant during World War II except in the military forces—he who has never been under arms never learns authentically to curse—and has degenerated badly since the advent of the television news broadcast, in which speech has become the sniveling lackey to impulses of light. Radio,

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being a medium in which the word is almost alone, was sympathetic to vitality in language, and in the first decade or so of the talking motion picture the dialogue was highly mannered, the product of craft, and delivered by actors each with his peculiar accent, enunciation, or even impediment. The result was a distinction of language that delighted both by its refreshing surprises and with its reliable familiarities. Neither the idiom of radio nor that of the movies was confused with the popular tongue. . . .
    What I’m saying is that the proprieties were everywhere maintained. Black people still were in possession of the ultimate means to freedom: their own speech, the brilliant coinages of which are nowadays seized at birth and instantly strangled on television by white, or at any rate white-talking men. . . . The possibilities for wit—and thus for life—decline with the homogenization of the language.⁶

Certainly, the language of Sneaky People is anything but homogenized and is the source of the great majority of the book’s wit and energy. Ralph’s mother, for example, strikes even her son as speaking a bit oddly ("almost English, sometimes reminding him of Merle Oberon"), and her writing style as "Mary Joy" is even more noteworthy:

New Years’s Day, 8 A.M.—Lying here upon my pink satin sheets, my black-lace nightie drawn up above the twin swellings of my creamy-white breasts, tipped with erect rubicund nipples surrounded by large roseate aureolae, I greet the fresh new year with an exploratory finger in the deepest recess of the warm, moist grotto between my heaving ivory thighs, and think of another Jan. 1 on which, like the year, I was too a virgin. . . . (pp. 252–253)

Berger’s narration in this novel subtly approaches tour de force in its combination of vernacular diction and rhythm with serpentine syntax as sentence after sentence winds toward increasingly specific images. When Ralph hears a friend revile the woman he has just become infatuated with, his reaction is described in typically humorous specificity:

That Hauser referred to Laverne Linda Lorraine; that drunkenly they had been heading for her staircase on Saturday night; that his kind friend on the one hand was on the other a stinking, vile, obscene criminal whose filthy tongue should be ripped out—all this was clear.
   But it could also be regarded as an established truth that, except in movies and ancient narratives such as the series about Frank Merriwell, a normal modern individual did not commit violence in response to verbal attacks on a woman’s honor, especially those made in ignorance by an imbecile

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who no doubt had been home all afternoon playing with himself while perusing the little eight-page fuckbook the edges of which could be seen protruding from his back pocket as he climbed the steps. (p. 178)

Sentences such as these are the norm in Sneaky People, supplying a kind of syntactic joy all their own, in addition to giving us humorous insights into the thinking of Berger’s characters.

If Sneaky People represents Berger’s "tribute to the American language of 1939" as used by "the lower-middle class in the eastern Middle West," then Neighbors must surely represent in part a very different kind of tribute to a very different kind of language—the levelled and banal commonplaces of post-television homogenization. Not only is Neighbors a book whose action consists primarily of functions of language, but it is also a book in which the characters rely almost exclusively on commonplace phrases such as "face the music," "it’s your word against mine," "take it like a man," "like a cornered rat," "clutching at straws," and so on.

Neighbors may offer the most verbal world Berger has created: like his Little Big Man (1964), it is a book in which language becomes the only operating reality.⁷ Berger’s protagonist, Earl Keese, a quiet, reasonable forty-nine-year-old suburbanite, tells people that his home sits "at the end of the road," because that construction sounds less "dispiriting" than would his saying he lives at a "dead end." But, when Harry and Ramona—new neighbors—move next door, within twenty-four hours Keese is faced with a sequence of situations so outrageous that he can find no rhetorical constructions to mask their threat or to maintain the hoax of his previously complacent life.

Mysterious and maddening, Harry and Ramona are, by turns, forward, friendly, rude, flattering, insulting, provoking, and threatening. Their words and actions are always unexpected and usually contradictory. For instance, when Keese first responds to Ramona’s knock at his door and phatically asks her "and what may I do for you?" her response is a most disconcerting "Anything you like. . . . The problem is what you want in return." More and more, the visits of Harry and Ramona seem like assaults. Their random comings and goings produce a series of off-balance events, each more preposterous than the last, gradually stripping Reese of his easy assumptions and habitual responses—not to mention his clothing.

Madcap physical changes punctuate Berger’s plot—entrances,

exits, searches, fights, a damaged car, a destroyed house, even a sudden death—but for all of its action, Neighbors might best be described as a series of functions of language: puns, platitudes, commonplaces, theories, definitions, excuses, accusations, rationalizations, promises, questions, threats—all acts performed with words. Keese, Berger has commented, "is a prisoner of what he believes to be his responsibilities, in language as in all else."⁸ Keese responds to what the world says it is doing, rather than to what it actually does and this makes him the perfect target of Ramona’s and Harry’s verbal hoaxes. They hoax him intermittently, but language itself hoaxes him continuously.

Harry and Ramona seem committed to tweaking Keese’s sensibility, to pushing him to see how far he will go to avoid humiliation, to pestering, haunting, and ultimately rearranging his life. Their decidedly un-neighborly behavior stuns him, placing him at such disadvantage in all his dealings with them that he is driven to respond in thoughts and actions even more outlandish than theirs. "Maybe I’m just testing you," Ramona cryptically observes, while all Keese can do is desperately sigh, "I am trying to adjust to a life in which chance encounters can be brutal."

In this absurdly skewed context, Harry’s firing a shotgun at Keese and offering him an obviously dirty coffee cup seem equally offensive, and Harry and Ramona sting Keese as much by accusing him of sarcasm as they do by falsely accusing him of attempted rape. Their behavior is so confusing in part because they keep shifting among the registers of social and linguistic codes—responding to the code of friendship with that for a feud, responding literally to figurative statements, refusing to speak or act on Keese’s "wavelength." And by refusing to comply with these codes of speech and action, they call attention to the arbitrary and essentially phatic patterns that govern so much of human interchange. Once these patterns have been exposed, their tenuous nature revealed by simple refusals to speak or act "right," the concept of "right" itself seems more and more problematic and in this crucible of paradoxes and contradictions, Earl must distill a new behavioral code to guide his actions—a new morality that in its complexity must follow Nietzsche "beyond good and evil."

As Keese’s experiences increasingly blur the lines between comedy and nightmare and between hallucination and reality, his relations with all those around him begin to undergo subtle

changes—a metamorphosis. He realizes that his life had grown so stale that Harry’s and Ramona’s crazy-seeming aggravations may actually offer him a salvation of sorts—the chance to take control of and give style to his life, to team up with them and "roam the boulevards with a supercilious smile for all, and glide through smart shops exchanging glib remarks." In a fundamental sense, Harry and Ramona reveal to him the meaning of "freedom." And this change is not beyond Keese’s notice, as he finally admits to Harry, "Every time I see you as a criminal, by another light you look like a kind of benefactor." Like almost all of Berger’s protagonists, Keese has been imprisoned by his own elaborate codes of responsibility, fairness, and decency, terms that seem to have no meaning for, much less control over, the actions of Harry and Ramona. As surely as Keese’s outrage over the seeming peccadilloes of his new neighbors grows dangerously, even pathologically, violent, chinks begin to appear in his moral armor. His initial impatience with "the philosophies which disregarded the problem of guilt," soon gives way to the realization that "it’s easy to excuse everything in some way. . . . For example, murder can be seen in one light as merely getting rid of someone—as a mere removal." It falls to his wife, Enid, to put things in perspective for him with her blunt explanation for her own questionable conduct: "What’s morality have to do with it?" she asks. "I’m speaking of self-preservation."

And so is Berger, but in a most subtle and complicated fashion, along lines explored in one way or another by Laclos, Nietzsche, Kafka, and by Berger himself in his three plays. Part of Berger’s achievement in Neighbors is that he has subsumed the traditions of these three writers within his own uniquely ironic style. Indeed, the best joke in Neighbors is that beneath its slapstick actions and farcical humor lies a very serious investigation of the relationship between freedom and victimization. Anyone familiar with Berger’s novels knows his longstanding fascination with the question of "who is kicker and who kickee," but it is not generally known that Berger has most directly confronted this issue in his plays.

Around 1969, Berger tried his hand at playwriting, completing three, all unpublished, but one of which, Other People, was produced in 1970 at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. Each of these plays (the other two are The Siamese Twins and Rex, Rita, and Roger) involves the ways in which definitions of self determine power relationships and each

develops a sense of paranoia out of seemingly absurd situations. However, Rex, Rita, and Roger, and The Siamese Twins seem to present almost a situational blueprint for Neighbors, both plays vexing a static domestic scene by introducing ominous outsiders.

Rex, Rita and Roger investigates the nature of will through a farcical confrontation, more than a little reminiscent of that in "Bartleby the Scrivener." Rex brings home to Rita, his wife, a man he had found in the subway. The man, Roger, is apparently incapable of exercising his will, and Rex sees in him a perfect pseudo-slave: since Roger has no will, he is completely compliant with Rex’s suggestions, and cannot be considered a slave only because he has no will to do other than what Rex demands. However, while he may not have a will, Roger does possess skills. In responding to questioning, he reveals an impressive command of gourmandise, and Rex and Rita decide that he will make a wonderful combination of chef/maitre-de. At their first dinner party, however, Roger’s expertise quickly shades into derision of their culinary ignorance and then into his taking complete charge of their and their guest’s actions. After a number of absurd confrontations, Rex regains control both of the situation and of his household, and his regaining of ascendancy is matched by certain gains in understanding. Rita notes that ever since Roger came into their house, Rex has "turned into quite the philosopher," while Rex notes that Roger has managed to free him from a lot of pressures. The pattern of the play raises many of the same issues more obliquely addressed by Bartleby’s paradoxical relationship with his employer, the main difference being that Berger presents the victim/victimizer relationship as necessarily cyclical and potentially enlightening: through their reciprocal master/slave roles, both Rex and Roger come to a new understanding of their need for each other.

The rough situational similarities between Rex, Rita, and Roger and Neighbors are nothing, however, when compared with those between Neighbors and The Siamese Twins. In that play, two new neighbors, "large, blond, and beautiful" Siamese twins—Robert and Roberta—descend upon the unquiet suburban household of Leo, his wife Phylis, and her transvestite brother, Francis. In much the style later employed by Harry and Ramona, these twins defy all the established social codes and immediately begin to critique and to disrupt Leo’s household. Apart from the exotic fact that they have been joined at the hip by a band of flesh, Robert and Roberta seem linked in some vague therapeutic

enterprise. They refer to themselves as useful intermediaries with an unbroken record of successes and wonder whether there may be others "in greater need" than Leo, Phylis, and Francis. "Who are you people? Where do you get the nerve to march into my house and take over?" screams Leo. As is true of Neighbors, The Siamese Twins consists of a series of absurd actions which are almost exclusively functions of language: accusations, criticisms, apologies, clichés, coaching, and commentary. Roberta and Robert seem determined to shock the members of the household into a kind of regression therapy. Their unpredictable antics completely restructure the dynamics of the relationships among Leo, Phylis, and Francis, but when the maddened Francis grabs a knife and cuts through the band of flesh that has joined them, Robert and Roberta begin to realize a number of flaws in their own seemingly harmonious existence. As is true of so many of Berger’s dramatic situations, radically changed perspectives completely undermine the seemingly clear distinctions between victim and victimizer.

Like Robert and Roberta, Harry and Ramona seem more than a little reminiscent of Nietzsche’s "blond brute," his prototypal "free spirit" (Earl explicitly describes them as "free spirits," while Ramona says, "We’re just a pair of shiftless zanies.") Certainly, the conflict between Earl and his new neighbors seems to dramatize the conflict described by Nietzsche as that between "slave" or "herd" and "master" moralities. Earl’s initially submissive behavior, his obsession with "proper" form, his growing sense of resentment, even his elaborate and violent imaginary retaliations, make him an almost perfect model for Nietzsche’s man of resentiment. The toothy and tawny Harry and Ramona flaunt their rudeness and their ungoverned instinctuality—both virtues in the Neitzschean scheme of things, both signs of an honest animality. Read in this manner, Neighbors becomes almost a dramatization (some might say a burlesque) of Nietzsche’s views of universal "neighborliness." It is Nietzsche who argues that fear and the will to power are what really structure relationships between humans, and he even specifies that it is fear of the neighbor that gives rise to "new perspectives of moral valuation." In what seems even more specifically the tone of Berger’s novel, Nietzsche states:

The striving for excellence is the striving to overwhelm one’s neighbor. . . . The striving for excellence brings with it for the neighbor—to name only a few steps of this long ladder:

tortures, then blows, then tenor, then anguished amazement, then wonder, then envy, then laughing, then ridicule, then derision, then scorn, then the dealings of blows, then the inflicting of tortures.⁹

A better description of the action of Neighbors would be hard to find.

If the world of Neighbors seems remarkably like that depicted in Neitzsche’s philosophy, it also should be noted that it has much in common with that of two novels: Kafka’s The Trial and Laclos’s Dangerous Acquaintances. While the epistolary form of Laclos’s masterpiece is, if at all, only faintly suggested by the great emphasis placed in Berger’s novel on disastrously funny telephone calls, both books create almost exclusively verbal worlds in which no two perspectives of an event ever agree and in which motivation is almost never what it seems. The nature of the relationship between Harry and Ramona seems as unorthodox and as unstable as that between Laclos’s Valmont and Madame de Merteuil, both pairs of "victimizers" become "victims" themselves, and both pairs seem to exist only on the axis of dominance and subordination. Both novels suggest (although in quite different terms) that alienation is a necessary step on the way to personal freedom. Substitute the Neitzschean concept of the "will to power" for Laclos’s concept of the "will to evil" and the resemblance between Neighbors and Dangerous Acquaintances becomes even more pronounced.

Berger’s homage to Kafka, from whom he learned that "at any moment banality might turn sinister, for existence was not meant to be unfailingly genial," is clearer still.¹⁰ Vocabularies from law and ethics intertwine throughout Neighbors, and Berger does not fail to exploit the incongruities of the two lexicons. Terms having to do with guilt, justice, punishment, revenge, motive, confession, defense, blame, crime, accusation, etc., appear on virtually every page of this novel, resonating at once with the rhetoric of the courtroom and with that of Kafka’s The Trial. In fact, one accurate summary of the action of Neighbors would be that it is a series of mock-trials, in a legal sense, all of which serve as a trial for Keese’s patience, and ultimately for his worldview. That Berger’s protagonist is another "K." is no accident, nor is Keese’s "guilt" unlike that of Kafka’s Joseph K.

But just as surely as Berger invokes the verbal worlds of Kafka or Nietzsche or Tarkington, his style radically transforms those worlds, his irony setting up a dizzying dialectic. In both Neighbors

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and Sneaky People that irony functions on at least three conceptual levels, located in the reading of the novels, in the place of language in the lives of his characters, and in the situations of life in general—experience common to both readers and characters. For the reader of these novels, a mild irony lies in the recognition of Berger’s celebration of earlier literary traditions, a subtle tweaking of forms that is in itself funny. More directly, Berger’s narrative continually foregrounds the ironic ways in which the worlds of his characters’ language are exposed as being at odds with the worlds of their experience. And, finally, the lives of those characters suggest not only that the joke implicit in imaginative literature mirrors a larger joke in the human condition but that death itself is but the ultimate irony. For Buddy Sandifer in Sneaky People, as for Earl Keese in Neighbors, death "could happen to anybody" and does—proving to be the sneakiest experience of all.

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

NOTES

   ¹Douglas Hughes. "Thomas Berger’s Elan," Confrontation, Summer 1976, p. 31. In a more recent interview by Jean P. Moore in the Tampa Tribune, December 21, 1981, p. 1D, Berger adds: "I seldom think my books are funny. . . . But of course my novels have comic moments."
   ²Crazy in Berlin (New York: Baron, 1970), pp. 247–248.
   ³For Berger’s reaction to the making of Neighbors into a film starring Aykroyd and Belushi, see Berger’s "I Am Not a Movie Person," in American Film, December 1981, pp. 34–36. For a wonderfully funny account of the events leading up to the making of the movie of Little Big Man, see "Thomas Berger on Little Big Man" in Audience, July, August 1972, pp. 38–45.
   ⁴Sneaky People, p. 279. Page references are to the 1975 Simon and Schuster edition.
   ⁵New York Times Book Review, April 20, 1975, p. 4. Mano’s review opens: "What you do, see, is go out and buy "Sneaky People." Period. No questions asked."
   ⁶Hughes, "Thomas Berger’s Elan," pp. 36–37.
   ⁷Parts of this description of Neighbors originally appeared in "Thomas Berger," Dictionary of Literary Biography: 1980, edited by Karen L. Rood, Jean W. Ross and Richard Ziegfeld (copyright 1981 Gale Research Company: reprinted by permission of the publisher), pp. 12–16.
   ⁸Richard Schickel, "Interviewing Thomas Berger," New York Times Book Review, 6 April 1980, p. 21.
   ⁹Friedrich Neitzsche, The Dawn, section 113, cited by Walter Kaufmann in Neitzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York: Meridian Books, 1965), p. 168. I am indebted to Stephen P. Thompson for calling to my attention some of the remarkably specific parallels to Neitzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals in Neighbors.
   ¹⁰Schickel, "Interviewing Thomas Berger," p. 21.

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