THOMAS BERGER: HIS WORLD OF WORDS, AND STEREOSCOPES OF STYLE

Cooking, eating, and the whole mystique of the repast mise-en-scene—which achieves apotheosis in Reinhart’s Women (1980), where Carlo Reinhart emerges as a gastronomic expert—has been in all twelve of Thomas Berger’s novels a favorite device for establishing character and providing setting, exposition, and dialogue. Food is not, however, the sole insistent preoccupation of Berger’s fiction, only one of the most delightful for his gourmet readers. Two principal thematic obsessions run through all the novels. One is that words are the medium, or artifice, of reality. The second is that style provides the structural underpinning to each of these verbal, or fictive, worlds.

"I look for myself through the English language," Berger confessed to one interviewer: "Writing for me is rather like living."¹ For years he has been telling this to anyone who would listen. The American language is the starting point of his fiction, and its actual subject, whatever dramatic configuration of persons and places the story might expediently take. Apropos of Reinhart’s Women he made the same point in 1982 with an asperity reserved usually for voices tired of not being heard: "As with all my novels, the language of this work is the theme; but I expect that as usual the tin-eared will fail to hear the delicate inflections and humorlessly mistake it for a study in comic anthropology."² Slyly, almost as a private matter, Berger has been demonstrating that language when wielded imaginatively, not for dissemblance but rather for restructuring experience, can authenticate the self. Like Nabokov’s, the "divine precision"³ of Berger’s prose synchronizes two forms of reality—a mimetic mirroring of existence, and an expressive distortion of its appearances—like a stereoscopic viewer bringing two scenes stylistically into single focus.

A corollary of the authenticating event that writing represents for Berger is the alignment of his style in each novel with its subject. "The only genuine problem I ever have in my work," he has said, "is in arriving at a style. Once I have it—or I should say ‘hear it’—the book writes itself. I serve but as an amanuensis to the Muse."⁴ According to Berger, if a writer is at all serious, he will "never do it the same way again."⁵ Buried in this somewhat oblique comment is an unarticulated aesthetic of moral sincerity⁶

and organic form, in which diction and syntax are the principal agents, reflecting the subject and determining the structure of the narrative. Berger put it unqualifiedly when he blurted out in an interview: "For me the structure comes from the style."⁷ Because of this symbiosis the fictional act becomes in his hands autoreferential, offering a structure of discourse whose verbal procedure within the narrative itself imposes on the reader a hermeneutical consciousness of how its interpretation should proceed. Unusual about Berger’s employment of a strategy apparently intrinsic to fictional narrative,⁸ and anything but unique in an age of consciously self-reflexive writing, is the marvel of "stylistic fecundity"⁹ that marks his twelve novels. Nor is this copiousness a display of virtuosity for its own sake. It is the compensatory side of an often verbose and meandering narrative. His novels read as if they shared one parent in outlook and philosophy but an uncommon parent in dress and presentation. Indifferent to economy of structure, Berger deploys a kaleidoscopic verbal instrument that not only delicately registers twentieth-century American mores but then adjusts them syndetically to the "comic absurd vision"¹⁰ animating each of his many fictional worlds. Berger consequently "resists classification"¹¹ as much in his distribution of prose styles as of novelistic forms. Indeed, his successive adaptations of the western, the detective story, the dystopian fantasy, the legendary tale are more readily identifiable, and definable, than are his accompanying variations of language, which defy comparable pigeon-holing.

In an interview he granted Richard Schickel in 1980, Berger disclosed an unexpected slant on Neighbors.¹² He proposed that while Harry and Ramona may be feckless and outrageous in their behavior they are more generous in spirit and hence probably essentially better regardless of the havoc they wreak than is their next-door neighbor Earl Keese, "a prisoner of what he believes to be his responsibilities, in language as in all else."¹³ A quick glance at the narrative is all that is needed to confirm Berger in how totally Keese confronts the world with conventionally polite phrases—what he believes is expected of him and assumes is socially appropriate—which leave him vulnerable to Harry and Ramona’s playful but tasteless assaults on his privacy. Keese’s opening remarks establish his rhetorically vacuous annexation of experience:

    "It would have been nice," said Earl Keese to himself as much as to the wife who sat across the coffee table from him, "to have asked

them over for a drink."
   "We can certainly do that tomorrow," said Enid. "Nothing is really lost."
   "But of course tomorrow won’t be the day they moved in, will it?" Keese reflectively sipped his transparent wine. "I find that if something is done when it should be done, it is not forgotten. Still, I suppose it’s no tragedy. We could probably get away with giving them no formal welcome whatever. It’s scarcely a true obligation." (p. 1)

The rest of Neighbors is a ferociously farcical demonstration of how mawkish and unnervingly irrelevant are Keese’s rhetorical flourishes for describing the real thing. Words function for him as gambits of social power. Otherwise devoid of meaning, their cant gestures mask his implicitly hostile feelings. Paradoxically, this defense proves inadequate against the bluntly literal words of others. His empty rhetoric is of no help in sorting out his responses to the manic pair who invade his life. He is trapped by proverbs of behavior that contradictorily advocate combining "self-interest with care-for-others," unlike his wife who clear-sightedly discloses near the end of their nightmarish weekend that Harry "makes my flesh crawl" and "turns my stomach," while Ramona is a "disgusting little bitch" (p. 219). As a result Keese’s words are moral cyphers. Worse yet, they counterfeit his relations with others. He sends his auditors false signals and in turn misreads their intentions, placing himself repeatedly in a false and unreal position vis-à-vis them. Fantasizing a new life in the city, away from the terrors of the suburbs, he tells his wife he doesn’t plan to reveal their new address to their daughter.

    "She’s almost twenty-two. How long are we required to keep rocking her cradle? When I think of the sacrifices we made . . ."
   Enid frowned. "I can’t think of a one."
   "Still, the principle is valid," Keese said with heat. (p. 218)

It is no wonder that his wife listens only half the time to what he says.

The physical equivalent to this verbal value-system is Keese’s "outlandish vision," which momentarily metamorphoses ordinary phenomena into perverse hallucinations. Before his dissembling eyes "an old lady bent over a cane" becomes "George Washington urinating against the wheel of a parked car"; and a "sleeping workingman’s face, propped on hand" seen in the window of a bus becomes "a brazen pervert blowing him a kiss." However, "on occasion reality did take a bizarre turn. . . . He had doubted

his eyes when seeing a nude fat man ascend the front steps of a public building. But this man had been real, and a rearview photo of him appeared in next morning’s newspaper." Because Keese feels himself bereft of a "standard of measurement" with which to distinguish his visions of reality from those of illusion he "in self-preservation . . . consistently rejects the evidence of his eyes" (p. 2).

The real irony involving Keese’s "strange malady" is that Berger tells the events of Neighbors from Keese’s misrepresentative point of view. Keese is the ultimate unreliable narrator, plunging the reader into an Alice-in-Wonderland world of unverifiable postures. We know that Keese rolls Harry’s car into the swamp, locks him in the cellar, throws him out of the house several times, and punches him in the eye (see ch. 11 where Harry enumerates these injuries done to him); but we have no fixed bearing for determining Harry and Ramona’s intentions or evaluating their words and actions: when they are joking, when satirizing Keese’s exaggerated "neighborliness," when truly hurting. We have only Enid’s and their daughter Elaine’s occasional correction of Keese’s misapprehensions and reproval of his actions. Elaine, for example, rejects his exculpations for being violent toward Harry. "‘Look at what he did last night,’ Keese points out. ‘I don’t recall his doing much,’ said she. ‘You punched him in the eye’"(p. 200). Usually, though, we are forced to use the corrupt code of Keese’s eyes and words for deciphering the actions of the weekend and the antics of Harry and Ramona; and Keese’s reportage oscillates between basking in excessive neighborliness and hallucinating with erotic and paranoiac fears.

A writer the boundaries of whose world is comprised of words will naturally err on the side of verbal excess, especially if he revels "in exuberance, extravagance, abundance," as Berger admits was his bent when younger.¹⁴ In his lexicon there often is consequently a thin demarcation between words used mendaciously and imaginatively, between lying and creating. A fiction resonate with such moral fineness makes critical judgments difficult. In the readiness of Berger’s characters to manipulate language in their own best interests, although concluding often humorously to their unintended disadvantage, is heard a recurrent familiar note in Berger’s otherwise varied voices. Nowhere is this trumped-up symphony of words louder than in the Reinhart volumes. No slouch himself with a word, Reinhart is forever falling among Princes of the Corrupt (and Corrupting) Remark. Bach

and Dr. Knebel (Crazy in Berlin [1958]), Reinhart’s "Maw" who greets his return from the Army with the observation "‘Here comes six more shirts per week,’" Splendor Mainwaring striving to impersonate his self-chosen given name, Claude Humbold with his promoter’s pie-in-the-sky patter, Blain Raven with his Old-Money-and-Family airs (Reinhart in Love [1962]), Bob Sweet and Eunice (Vital Parts [1970])—all are Wordsmiths of scintillating illusion and prevarication. Reinhart finds their word-wizardry irresistible. Again and again he is tempted into falls from grace by their siren songs. Less endowed with the "gift of gab" than her boss Humbold (whose name is an appropriate punning echo of humbug), Reinhart’s bete noire and wife Genevieve Raven is no less "gifted" in the art of linguistic delusion. After their farcical lovemaking in the back seat of a car, during which Reinhart copes furiously with a girdle—"all boilerplate, except at the only point worth protection; Fort Knox with an impregnable wall and open gate"—that sums up Genevieve’s captious yes-no approach to the whole action, she disingenuously pleads, "‘Tell me it was just petting . . . because we didn’t even have our clothes off.’"¹⁵

The aftermath of the episode—her threat to charge Reinhart with sexual assault causes him hastily to marry her—reveals Genevieve’s calculating plan of entrapment from first date to wedding vows. Berger, however, is not as quick to condemn the ethical shadiness of her actions as we might be. He is troubled that Douglas Hughes "misinterprets her as a nitwit," since Berger can "not imagine a more suitable wife for Reinhart. . . . She shrewdly succeeds in every effort, which with her is always practical and proximate. Reinhart, being an idealist with his eye on the forest, collides with every individual tree. Quite rightly he admires Gen’s command of immediate reality."¹⁶ Similar verbal doppelgangering joins in kinship Splendor Mainwaring’s illusions, Claude Humbold’s "Bidniss of America is Bidniss" ethics, and Blaine Raven’s presumptuous airs.

The novel in which Berger most austerely projects a world posited on inane verbal practices is Killing Time (1967). Given Berger’s ardor for the English language ("a book of mine is written in the English language, which I love with all my heart and write to the best of my ability and with the most honorable intentions"),¹⁷ Killing Time is a daring, even desperate, attempt to characterize humanity’s disdain for its most glorious tool. The book presents daunting obstacles to getting a handle on it for that reason. As astute a reader as William H. Gass has

condemned it as "not a construction of language," asserting the novel’s words "are not used, they merely appear in typographical rows like lines of old cars in those hilly automobile cemeteries"¹⁸—no mean instance itself of the charge being leveled here against Berger. Gass brilliantly pinpoints the effects of a language emptied of meaning while remaining insensitive to Berger’s linguistic awareness. Gass of all people should not have missed such metafictional irreverence. Practically everyone in the book is involved in communication—journalists, lawyers, psychiatrists, spiritualists, ghost-writers, detectives—and most in telling some version of the events producing Detweiler’s murder of three people. It is written at once in a flat, unemotional, dryly precise prose of fact—the newspaper report, the police record, the psychiatric session, the legal brief—and also in a language of mental and emotional bombast. Betty alludes to her treatment by two men who know that she is writing a roman a clef as a betrayal "foully by persons privy to her dearest secret" (p. 19). Having tried to emasculate himself, Detweiler objects in moral outrage to introduction of the fact as evidence of his insanity in his trial for the murder of two women. "Have you no decency?" he demands of his psychiatrist, "There will be women in that courtroom" (p. 305). Detective Tierney’s wife reacts with incensed Catholic rectitude at the timing and object of Detweiler’s homicidal tendencies. "What kind of man would kill on Christmas Eve?" she asks rhetorically, and later in the conversation answers her question with another non sequitur, "he killed women, did he not? The dirty pervert" (pp. 261, 263). The absurdity of such observations is that for all their involvement with the intensest of human experiences, love, sex, and death, they have little affective connection with the reality of the events they allude to.

Killing Time cues our hermeneutical consciousness as regards its concern with the self-defeating excesses of language, by having as its protagonist a certifiable madman and homicide who is rationally, even intelligently, and cheerfully bent on discarding language as a system for retrieving and preserving the past. Detweiler is obsessed instead with summoning up ("Realization" is his word) the past as it originally and actually was, and forever is. His extreme philosophy is that only "The act is the truth, really. Everything else is language" (p. 303). But to dispense with language is to cut oneself off from reality, as has Detweiler, who encapsulates in his cavalier treatment of language what the other participants in the narrative are no less guilty of. Betty Starr, Killing Time cues our hermeneutical consciousness as regards its concern with the self-defeating excesses of language, by having as its protagonist a certifiable madman and homicide who is rationally, even intelligently, and cheerfully bent on discarding language as a system for retrieving and preserving the past. Detweiler is obsessed instead with summoning up ("Realization" is his word) the past as it originally and actually was, and forever is. His extreme philosophy is that only "The act is the truth, really. Everything else is language" (p. 303). But to dispense with language is to cut oneself off from reality, as has Detweiler, who encapsulates in his cavalier treatment of language what the other participants in the narrative are no less guilty of. Betty Starr,

for example, vaporizes an adolescent encounter with a pervert into banal phantasmagoria:

The awakening, confused passions of the pubescent girl versus the jaded appetite of the man past his prime: two kinds of appearance and no reality at all. It was pure poetry and the most beautiful experience Betty had ever known. (p. 44)

With this transfiguration of her experience Betty slips into a terra incognita no less apparitional than Detweiler’s remembrance of his baby sister’s death by scalding coffee as a series of beautiful liquid transformations (pp. 131–32).

Equally disconnected from reality are Detweiler’s realization[s], Betty’s romance-magazine renditions of life, the journalist Alloway’s formulaic reporting of news, and the criminal lawyer Melrose’s "high art" of defense pleading. In their conceptualizations Berger has boldly imagined a world in which a stunning gap separates murder, crime, and infidelity from the linguistic reportage, correction, and recreation of them. All are modes of killing time, with murder the extreme form. Detweiler’s realizations and Betty’s storytelling, which she suspects is "a kind of crime" (p. 313), are simply less lethal modes of wiping out "all manner of historical incidents" (p. 372) by reconstituting them in puerile terms. Aping these sets of semantic oppositions and their "sinister force" of language (p. 313), Berger like his characters is killing time by writing about them writing about themselves, but with the one crucial difference that he enacts in the process their delicate transformation into a novel’s responsible, imaginative holding of time at bay. Killing Time is an absurdist joke played out on the exhausted edge of words at the expense of Gass and the single-minded reader.

However unique a style Berger might wish to devise for each of his novels, superficial features of kinship such as a doubling of ironic perspective²⁰ provide secondary marks of relationship. The Reinhart novels, for example, share a diction, tone, and social view that reveal their common origin. Yet, there is a stylistic encodement of each fictional statement (Crazy in Berlin may be the exception) that not only functions genetically as midwife to Berger but also heuristically as reading-master to the reader.

Contrary to the inferences of its title Reinhart in Love crackles and pops stylistically with unloving, threatening gestures. Leaving the Army Discharge Depot enroute back to civilian life after World War II, our erstwhile hero is assailed by the "mustard-gas exhaust"

of a bus "slaying every living thing for a hundred yards" (p. 3). With disbelief he watches a "wave of dischargees hurtling down the camp road after it like hyenas who have sighted a cadaver"; and he is unable even with his "great strength . . . to open the bus window sealed years ago by some Detroit assembly-line sadist" (p. 4). To survive the fearful civil battleground of America, its "rat-faced vendors," "dead fountains," and "delicatessens, even a supermarket or two burning bright in the forests of the night" (pp. 4, 7, 11), he attempts to cultivate cynicism—with little success, however. As readers attest, Reinhart remains idealistic and vulnerable—it is the source of his charm—in his headlong plunges into life and grapplings with what Saul Bellow in Herzog calls the "reality instructors." The language mocks Reinhart’s need to love, and be loved. It bristles with aggression, with the diction and imagery of war, brigandage, personal assault, predatory beasts, belittlement, and put down. As an ironic commentary on the ostensible brief of Reinhart in Love, it signals to us how the novel is to be read, and is thus a fitting accompaniment to the shrewd reality-instruction of the pugnacious and even rapacious individuals with whom Reinhart finds himself in "loving" embrace: Blame Raven and his daughter Genevieve, Claude Humbold, Reinhart’s mother "Maw" Reinhart, even Splendor Mainwaring.

The duality of perspective partakes both of illusion and fact. Through the medium of the style we see as if with the blinkered self-satisfied eyes of the small-town Midwesterner, at once prejudiced, loud-mouthed, larcenous, open-hearted, generous, and idealistic. Nor is Reinhart, however much the spectator and the acted upon,²¹ entirely exempt from the chiastic hug that chokes, the malice that begs for acceptance, the geniality that harbors mayhem. Beneath his buffoon-like good nature is buried much ready hostility. He is a free spirit who can be driven to cut off the air of anyone who threatens his own oxygen supply. This simultaneous high and low road to wealth and happiness moves us back and fourth "from reel life to real life." It characterizes alike Reinhart’s "beastly handsome" father-in-law, and his friend Splendor’s high-stepping style and slum-manners etiquette. Nowhere is the double focus more pervasive than in Reinhart’s and Genevieve’s love-hate relationship, in their pre- and postcoital feelings of attraction-repulsion, and in their mutual uncertainties about one another’s loyalties and treacheries. Significantly, during his ill-fated "seduction" of Genevieve, Reinhart

in a Freudian slip mistakenly addresses her as Guinevere, casting himself ambiguously in the roles of both King Arthur and Sir Launcelot.

Genevieve epitomizes the two-way squint of the narrative. There are, for example, her attractive physical appearance ("cute little chicken rump") and her mean-minded temperament. Wittily inventive of the self-referential yet ironically aporetic point of view basic to the narrative voice are her banal malapropisms. She misphrases clichés so badly that she ends up saying ostensibly the opposite of what she intends, leaving Reinhart condescendingly irritated. "I think the most you would do is carry me," she says to him; "by which she apparently meant the least," Reinhart puzzles out (p. 184). The irony here is that he is right by his lights and his respect for language, and mistaken by Genevieve’s, to his eventual dismay; for she is never more realistic than when she seems to be verbally distorting reality. The malapropism is her opening gambit in the "seduction" scene. She has rejected Reinhart’s ardent advances, and in flinging herself out of the car fallen and presumably wrenched her leg. By the "most" he would do, she pretends an innocence calculated to charm Reinhart’s sense of linguistic superiority, and at the same time signals the long-term reward she expects to derive from Reinhart’s enthrallment, against which his linguistic sophistication proves poor protection.

No discussion of Berger’s language can conclude without a look at two novels easily mistaken for "comic anthropolog[ies]"—Regiment of Women²² and Sneaky People (1975)—as well as a side glance at the literary parody, Who is Teddy Villanova?(1977).

The gay hysteria of Regiment of Women’s style establishes an air of self-loathing in accord with the power trip which governs everyone in this imagined world of reversible sexual roles. Its viewpoint, always at the emotional stretch, fearful, jealous, excessive in feeling, and tremulous with shame at the ever present threat of rape, is superbly imaged in the female "skewering" of the male’s "soul and sphincter" (p. 15), a therapeutic distributing of "pain" (p. 15) in the name of love. The peculiar air of the style derives from the ambiguous transfer of learned traits from one sex to the other, along with some of the diction associated with these traits, but not all. The male continues to be described as virile, while otherwise dressed as a woman and thinking of himself as weak, seductive, timid, inferior, soft, and fluttery in

mannerism. The female remains tagged as effeminate, while dressed as a man and acting as a tough, aggressive, brutal, and superior foul-mouthed person. This leads to such solecisms as calling the male "virilely bitchy" and the female "effeminately authoritative" (p. 187). The effect is that of a male in drag trying to pass as a male, a style highly effective in the depiction of Georgie Cornell and Harriet, who are struggling through a moraine of culturally nurtured assumptions to realize their true biological identities. The prose reproduces with uncanny accuracy the sexual ambiguity of their so-called "perversion." Berger creates here a unique world, which is at the same time in its half-tones the reflection of one familiar to us, while avoiding the pitfall Coleridge calls attention to when he remarks, "We do not adopt the language of a class by the mere adoption of such words exclusively as that class would use, or at least understand."²³ Through the doppelganger diction of Regiment of Women Berger dramatizes paradoxically that sex roles may be societally idealized and naturally generated. Such words as "mother’s milk" evoke in his emotionally confused protagonists a learned response of obscene revulsion as easily as the comforting emotions as old as biological life. Berger is exploring in Regiment of Women a linguistic no-man’s land where the joy and reality of life resides in fitting the right word with "its refreshing surprises and its reliable familiarities"²⁴ to an authentic feeling. This is beautifully dramatized in the "utopian-pastoral-anatomical romance"²⁵ of the ending. There, Georgie and Harriet overcome their society’s linguistic and cultural deterrents to love. Taught to define fond embraces as attempts at strangling, love-making as criminal assault, and coitus as murder, they discover sex as if they were Adam and Eve at the dawn of time. The novel ends with the halting, authentic pleasure they take in each other and, in an expressive act as ancient as the division of the sexes, by remaking their vocabulary to match the new reality.

Sneaky People²⁶ lovingly recreates the small-town Midwestern world of the late thirties behind whose moral facade of respectability and outwardly placid existence people carry on unseemly secondary lives of sexual phantasizing. More than one reviewer believed the novel to be concerned with the fifteen-year-old Ralph Sandifer’s "trading-in of his innocence";²⁷ but Berger has cast a much wider net of secretive yearnings than that, not least being the author’s own nostalgia for the American vernacular of his boyhood.²⁸ Whether it is Leo Kirsch’s repressed hatred²⁶ lovingly recreates the small-town Midwestern world of the late thirties behind whose moral facade of respectability and outwardly placid existence people carry on unseemly secondary lives of sexual phantasizing. More than one reviewer believed the novel to be concerned with the fifteen-year-old Ralph Sandifer’s "trading-in of his innocence";²⁷ but Berger has cast a much wider net of secretive yearnings than that, not least being the author’s own nostalgia for the American vernacular of his boyhood.²⁸ Whether it is Leo Kirsch’s repressed hatred

of his mother, Buddy Sandifer’s promiscuous philandering, or Naomi Sandifer’s dissembling pornographic diaries, the bond uniting them in a community of like interest is the improvement in the quality of their lives through make-believe. And the prose style operates similarly on more than one level of insinuation. The plain-spoken Midwestern voice of the narrator opts for a utilitarian prose that is guardedly content with celebrating the familiar appearance of persons and places. But his faithful adherence to the speech of his characters allows the dark undercurrent of their obsessions to bubble to the surface in coinages heavily scatological and erotogenic: "acting so pricky" (ch. 1), "bazooms wobbling" (ch. 2), "nookie I’m smelling" (ch. 3), "stinking up the crapper," "beat your dummy," and "keep your nose clean" (ch. 8), "get your ashes hauled" (ch. 9), "little pissant" and "creamed your jeans" (ch. 10), "sweet patootie" (ch. 11), "her keester felt like a loaded garbage can" (ch. 16). Berger farcically underlines the societal code of duplicity when he has the cheerfully amoral prostitute Laverne fastidiously object to Buddy’s use of the word "cundrums" (ch. 2), the motto of her life being, daydream it, do it, but don’t name it.

Berger’s many styles represent a continuing celebration of the self-regenerative powers of language. He is the closest we have today to that rare literary fauna, the writer’s writer, the literate dweller among the fictional forms and styles of his tools of trade. He works at the extremities of the linguistic atlas, rehabilitating coinages worn out by time, by homogenizing uniformity, and by media overuse. As he recognizes, his special area of expertise is the vernacular in the eastern Middle West of the 1920s and ’30s. The difficulty of his style resides in its endemic bi-focus: its faithful gesture toward tongues whose vital roots are sunk deep in reality, hand in hand with a sneaking predilection for the mannered and the artful, for any medium (like radio, film, and popular literary genres) which has developed a singular idiom. Describing his son, Splendor Mainwaring speaks for Berger as much as contrariwise for himself and Reinhart when he says to the latter: "Raymond will say almost anything. He has discovered the technique of bold assertion, in which the content is almost irrelevant. He is American to the core: to say is to be. You and I make a distinction between rhetoric and reality."²⁹ Berger regularly uses rhetorical extremes as the vehicle for his novels. The result can be at times disconcerting. Berger seems to applaud the exercise of imagining and writing fictions, however tacky or

amateurish the product, and perversely to enjoy peopling his novels with bad practitioners of his craft. An intriguing parallel to Betty Starr’s banal, yet imaginatively satisfying fictional reconstruction of her life in Killing Time, is Naomi Sandifer’s secret life in Sneaky People as a writer of pornography. In the latter instance, Berger wittily conjoins Naomi’s improbably formal speech ("I withdraw my statement") which her husband loathes as "phony" ("Why . . . can’t you say just: ‘I take it back’" p. 234), with the artificial configurations of her pornographic fantasies. Betty and Naomi are marginal writers. Russel Wren is another. He is the erstwhile seeing eye and narrative voice of Who Is Teddy Villanova?,³⁰ his tin ear glorying in an ornate self-conscious language that is at times a pastiche of "addled Shakespearean and other literary, qua literate allusions,"³¹ and at other times a clumsy orthographical reproduction of American dialects such as the New York accent of Sam Polidor. Introduced to us speaking standard English, Polidor ends up sounding like a bad writer’s idea of lower-class New Yorkese: "Uh nairline stew with a great sensa yooma. I met huh rin a singles place" (p. 235). Yet, Berger grants these "Forgers of lawless tales"³² the same power to "invent, construct, distort, and prevaricate," to create a "truth that had not occurred" (Killing Time, p. 316), and to experience the imaginative high of improving on life that he reserves for his own novels.

Writers win kudos from the academy by devising recognizable styles, distinctive sounds setting each apart from his fellows. Certainly, contemporary respect for the voices of Bellow, Mailer, Barth, and Malamud is well-earned. But this criteria of excellence should not dull our ear to the multiple octaval range of Thomas Berger’s tongue. For twenty-five years now the varied tones of his farcical fiction have been absorbing resonances until it is one of the most flexible verbal instruments around. But this versatility has been a mixed blessing as regards his reception by the reading public. Our ears, only half-tuned to the harmonies and counterpoint of his literarily varied twelve-tone scale, need to start listening with the intelligence and care he deserves.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

NOTES

   ¹Douglas Hughes, "Thomas Berger’s Élan," Confrontation, 12 (1976), 27, 29.
    ²Thomas Berger, "Works in Progress," New York Times Book Review, 6 June
1982, p. 11.
    ³The context for Berger’s words is as follows: "I don’t think Nabokov is an influence, but he has exerted a force on me, perhaps the kind some writers get from their editors. Which is to say that after reading Nabokov, with his divine precision, I tend to examine my own language more carefully, asking myself whether that’s the best I can do, whether I cannot be more precise, more evocative" (Hughes, p. 27).
    ⁴Richard Schickel, "Interviewing Thomas Berger," New York Times Book Review, 6 April 1980, p. 22. Berger is fond of the idea. In his interview with Hughes (p. 30), he facetiously avers: "The Reinhart books, of course, surprise me with every new line that issues from the typewriter. . . . It is, in fact, my characters who write my books not me.
    ⁵Schickel, p. 22.
    ⁶Berger has this to say on the subject: "Language is tremendously important to me. It’s a morality and a politics and a religion. I really believe that if you write well you’re a ‘good’ man" (Hughes, p. 27).
    ⁷Hughes, p. 30.
    ⁸See, for example, Gerald Prince, "Narrative Analysis and Narratology," New Literary History, 13 (1982), 179–88.
    ⁹Brom Weber, rev. of Vital Parts, by Thomas Berger, Saturday Review, 55 (21 March 1970), 42.
    ¹⁰Ihab Hassan, "Conscience and Incongruity: The Fiction of Thomas Berger," Critique, 5 (1962), 4.
    ¹¹Brooks Landon, "The Radical Americanist," Nation, 125 (1977), 151.
    ¹²Neighbors (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1980). Further references to this work will appear in the text.
    ¹³Schickel, p. 21.
    ¹⁴Hughes, p. 31.
    ¹⁵Reinhart in Love (New York: Delacorte Press, 1982), pp. 186, 188. Further references to this work will appear in the text.
    ¹⁶Hughes, p. 34.
    ¹⁷Schickel, p. 22.
    ¹⁸William H. Gass, "Fumbling Sleight of Hand," rev. of Killing Time, New York Times Book Review, 17 September 1967, p. 6.
    ¹⁹Killing Time (New York: Delta Book/Seymour Lawrence, 1981), p. 313. Further references to this work will appear in the text.
    ²⁰On his proclivity for "double-indemnity" irony, so to speak, Berger observes: "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 that which has been exposed as illusion or delusion is actually true. Claude Humbold in Reinhart in Love, for example, is so chicane as to achieve finally a kind of integrity" (Hughes, p. 31).
    ²¹Landon, p. 152.
    ²²Regiment of Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). Further references to this work will appear in the text.
    ²³Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1975), p. 201.
    ²⁴Hughes, p. 36.

    ²⁵Ibid.
    ²⁶Sneaky People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975). Further references to this work appear in the text.
   ^{27See Richard Todd, "Escaping Folk Categories," Atlantic, 136 (September 1975), 84.
   28"Sneek Peep (as I always referred to my seventh novel in correspondence with my editor . . .)," Berger discloses, "is my tribute to the American language 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. I can think of no pretext more serious, morally or aesthetically, for the writing of a novel" (Hughes, p. 37).
   29Vital Parts (New York: Richard W. Baron, 1970), p. 370.
   30Who Is Teddy Villanova? (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1977). Further references to this work appear in the text.
   31Bruce Allen, "Dream Journeys," Sewanee Review, 85 (1977), 691.
   William Wordsworth, The Prelude [1805], V, 548.}

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