Meeting Evil (2 page)
Beyond any other literary influence or comradeship, the paradoxical logic by which Berger unfolds his scenes connects him above all to Franz Kafka. Too many contemporary writers kowtow to Kafka in blackface: ostentatiously dreamlike settings,
Shadows and Fog
-ian Eastern European atmosphere or diction. Berger engages with Kafka’s influence at a more native and universal level, by grasping the way Kafka reconstructed fictional time and causality to align it with his emotional and philosophical reservations about human life. Berger’s tone, like Kafka’s, never oversells paranoia or despair. Instead, Berger explores the fallibility of the human effort to feel justified or consoled in the gaze of any other being, with meticulous, even affectionate, gestures of reserve and regret. As in the elder writer, there is nothing so absurd or heartbreaking as the disparity between intention and act, or speech. The result of Berger’s patient domestication of Kafka’s method is, actually, never dreamlike. Instead, Berger locates that part of our
waking
life which unfolds in the manner of Zeno’s paradox, where it is possible only to fall agonizingly short in any effort to be understood, or to do good. In doing so, he illuminates what it
was that necessitated Kafka’s exaggerations. And by splitting the difference halfway back to daylight—and setting his daylit persecutions amid strip malls and suburban developments—he unnerves us even more deeply.
Patricia Highsmith is the only other American writer I can think of who has attained this profound incorporation of Kafka, particularly in her
A Dog’s Ransom
and
The Cry of the Owl.
The irony is that the justly acclaimed Highsmith does little else that is more than competent, while Berger offers this and so many other pleasures: paradox, wit, slyness, and the diction and vocabulary of a Henry James meets H. L. Mencken. Berger’s as brilliant a student of American talk as Nabokov or DeLillo, and his favorite sentences, especially in dialogue, pivot on fragments of tabloid squawk elevated to odd majesty by their surrounding syntax. Indeed, to believe Berger’s own (suspect) testimony, language is his
only
subject. Among his countless eloquent demurrals of discussion of the moral, philosophical, or psychological implications of his work, my favorite is one given to Brooks Landon, Berger’s most important critic and explicator: “I have never believed that I work in the service of secular rationalism (the man of good will, the sensible fellow, the social meliorist who believes the novel holds up a mirror to society, etc.). I am essentially a voyeur of copulating words.”
Those demurrals reflect Berger’s distrust of the shifting ground of language, and his horror of abstractions and false certainties, which preclude nearly any human gesture less immediate than the cooking by one person of a delicious meal for another. All else is laden with presumption at best, grim manipulation at worst: every person is surely full of purposes, and Berger suspects his own as direly as anyone else’s (“Remember that you will understand my work best when you are at your most selfish,” he has also told Landon). The letters that I am so fortunate as to receive from Berger are full of
enthusiasms: for character actors like Elisha Cook Jr. and Laird Cregar; for Superman comics; for Anthony Powell’s
A Dance to the Music of Time
; for the novels of Barbara Pym, Marcel Proust, and Frank Norris; and as well for some but not all of the writers and filmmakers to whom I’ve presumed to compare him. Perhaps the feast of culture is another port in the storm of existence, though Berger’s main characters are never artists or writers, and those few creative types that do appear are usually buffoons or ogres if not both.
Brooks Landon has explored Berger’s sustaining relationship to Nietzsche, whose delineation of “slave” and “master” personalities certainly presages Berger’s interdependent victims and victimizers. Another astute Berger critic, John Carlos Rowe, has discerned an engagement with existentialism of the type which was fashionable in postwar culture, when Berger began writing (and which can be seen to lay the ground for those rebellions of the 1960s, literary and otherwise, that Berger conspicuously resisted). I’m not qualified in philosophical commentary, but it seems unmistakable that the murderers in
Killing Time
and
Meeting Evil,
so unalike in other ways, nevertheless both reflect a fascination with existentialist rationales for motiveless murder, à la
Crime and Punishment
and Camus’
The Stranger
and Hitchcock’s
Rope.
What’s clear, too, is that in his novels of menace Berger is compelled by and attracted to his provocateur villains for their dynamism, and for their talent for testing the certainties of everyday life, the rote morals of policemen, etc. And yet, unlike the typical novelists of Berger’s own generation, the Keseys and Kerouacs, and even the Updikes and Roths, the dissident against social complacency is
never
Berger’s hero. In the case of
Meeting Evil,
Berger has confessed to me that while he had to consult a copy to even recall John Felton’s name, Richie is one of his favorite among his own characters—yet elsewhere Berger has enthusiastically endorsed the verdict of the title: Richie is evil, and
must be destroyed. What Berger resists in social rebellion is its resemblance to what it attacks: its self-validating smugness, its readiness to manipulate in its own cause, its cobbled-together moral jargon, its bottom-line disinterest in the mystery of daily existence, its poor listening skills.
Berger isn’t an experimental writer in any of the usual senses of the word. But in his ferocious devotion to paradox and irony as investigatory tools, his fiction consists of an endless, irresolvable experiment into what can be translated out of the morass of lived human days into useful and entertaining stories—though Berger would likely argue that no story can be useful, and then jibe that no one was intended to be entertained beyond himself. Berger’s uncertainty is his being, and his implement. The uniquely vertiginous nature of a page of his fiction is testament to the daily experiment of his art.
In the Bergerian world, masks are often peeled away to reveal further masks, yet just as often what was mistaken for a mask turns out to be a face. No irony is conclusive enough not to give way to a deeper irony, and the deepest of all is the realization that first impressions are sometimes adequate, or that it is the rare quandary that is actually improved by sustained pondering. Fate is for the embracing. As a Berger policeman once wisely remarked, “Death can happen to anyone.” No one, however grotesque or ill-mannered, is so remote from the human predicament that he is ineligible for the occasional epiphanic insight, yet no one, however saintly or patient, is likely to be able to make use of the insights at hand in the flurry of a practical transaction involving another person. Just when Bergerian loneliness seems ubiquitous, contact is unexpectedly made, and though Berger’s sex scenes are often barren and harsh his tender evocations of romantic hope and yearning may be the least appreciated aspect of his books. No grace can ever be earned, in Berger’s world, but it does fall like precious rain here and there.
Meeting Evil
is on the unmerciful side of his shelf, but odd, sunny moments break through even so—it wouldn’t be Berger otherwise. It is also relatively spare, in the manner of all his later books apart from the
Little Big Man
sequel. The structure, hard to discern on the first roller-coaster plunge through, is elegant and ironclad: In the first section John Felton is persecuted and harassed by the police, by bystanders, and by his wife; in the third section, he is abandoned by all of them. Richie’s incursion is the only consistent note in his reality, and it is one of purest mayhem; the only person responsive to John is a madman. Between, in the book’s second section, Berger delves into Richie’s self-justifying viewpoint, in pages as lean and shocking as an X ray of the brain of a shark. In those, we learn that the madman listens to John for the simplest reason: he likes him.
Berger is now seventy-eight years old. It’s a rare privilege to witness a great novelist’s arc beyond such an age, but Berger is still unflagging, and it may not be too much to wish for several more novels. The most recent books are gentler, more forgiving, and often serve as overt or covert consolidations of earlier sequences in his work. In this manner,
Orrie’s Story
returned to the midwestern panoramas of
Sneaky People
and
The Feud,
while the almost completely overlooked
Suspects
(has it even had a paperback edition?) revisits the sincere and troubled (though, in inquisitory method, malicious) policemen of
Killing Time
while excusing them the duty of confronting an existential superman. And, just as the fourth Reinhart novel,
Reinhart’s Women,
sheltered that beset character from the historical strife of the first three books, his newest,
Best Friends,
may be seen partly as a gentle capstone to the three novels of menace that include
Meeting Evil.
In it, the twinned characters, usurper and usurpee (can you tell them apart?), meet not as strangers but as lifelong friends who uncover the strangeness hidden inside familiarity. But it is also a pining love
story, another Kafkaesque parable of shifting perspective, and much more: Berger has insisted, in his letters to me, that
Best Friends
felt to him, in the writing, like nothing he’d ever done before. As a fellow novelist this nearly brings tears to my eyes. I can only pray that at such an age I’ll be not only working at all but working in Berger’s manner, without presumptions, without a safety net constructed of all the good reviews he’s gathered over a lifetime. Each time Berger writes he ventures out with only his style for courage.
As a favor to my friend I have avoided the word which has dogged his years on this planet: I have not called him
comic.
But I would fail here if I didn’t report that his books have made me laugh harder, over
my
years on the planet, than any others on my shelves. I predict that you will laugh too, and that you will find, as I have, that this laughter sustains itself even after the contemplation, inevitable after absorbing more than one or two of Berger’s books, of the vast distress at the universal human plight (though it is an even-keeled, contemplative distress, as in the way of the Buddha) which necessitated their writing. Berger isn’t comic. He, like life, is merely, and hugely, fucking funny.
Meeting Evil
PERHAPS John Felton had got married too young, but he really did love Joanie and, besides, she was pregnant and came from a family which, though believing abortion was wrong, would have been disgraced by an illegitimate birth, with several of its members active in local church affairs and one in the politics of the county. So he became a father the first time almost simultaneously with becoming a husband.
Then before Melanie was quite three years of age she was joined by a newborn brother they prudently named for her mother’s uncle Philip, a small businessman who had retired on the tidy sum paid for his prime-location premises (where he had sold floor coverings) by the firm that intended to demolish them along with neighboring structures and build a medium-sized mall on the property. But Uncle Phil was conspicuously healthy and still not nearly old enough to be considered a prompt source of financial relief for his presumed heirs. They were paying too much for a house though John was himself a real-estate salesman—at the moment in a buyer’s market.
John worked weekends, showing houses to potential buyers when there were such, and took Mondays off, which permitted Joanie to catch up on her sleep in the morning, and in the afternoon shop or visit the hairdresser. Even so—and whenever he was home he shared in the chores, including wee-hour calls from baby Phil—having to care for two small children was leaving its mark on his young wife, who, he had to admit to himself, already looked as if she had been married twice as long as was actually the case.
