THE FEUD by Thomas Berger; Delacorte; 265 pages; $13.95
Even after a dozen novels, including Little Big Man and four books about the lunk hero Carlo Reinhart, Thomas Berger remains a cult writer who shuns literary society and sometimes the 20th century. The Reinhart series (Crazy in Berlin, Reinhart in Love, Vital Parts and Reinhart's Women), published over a 23-year period, suggested that the author viewed postwar American dreams and the liberal imagination with a considered lack of seriousness. Little Big Man's Jack Crabb left a permanent brand on the founding myths of the Old West, and Neighbors contained a persuasive argument for living in the Yukon with an unlisted phone number and a mailbox stenciled THE LEPERS.
Berger, 58, has contributed a great deal to social satire. Unlike many of the faded comic ironists of his generation, he does not appear to have run out of material or energy. The former is not necessarily related to the latter. There is always more raw material for satire than one writer can handle in a lifetime. However, energy usually comes from a rare devotion to an insistent internal voice.
The Feud is further evidence of how deeply Berger remains committed to his marvelously skewed sense of language and the hapless bipeds who use it. The novel is set in the small-town America of the late 1930s, a place and time frequently celebrated in nostalgic memory. It has been said that life was less complicated then and that the Depression bound families to a common cause. Perhaps, but in Berger's small neighboring towns of Millville and Hornbeck, such pretty thoughts do not have a prayer against ornery pride, low animal cunning and the mayhem loosed by the crazed and the lovestruck.
Initially, Berger's storyline seems to have been teased out of a W.C. Fields film like The Bank Dick. Hornbeck's Dolf Beeler, "a burly, beer-bellied foreman," enters Bud Bullard's Millville hardware store for a can of paint remover. The dead cigar butt in Beeler's mouth leads to an argument about smoking on premises stocked with flammable merchandise. The appearance of Bullard's cousin Reverton is a piece of unfortunate timing. Rev is a bitter geezer who lies about being a railroad detective and carries a starter pistol to intimidate his enemies, meaning anyone not a relative. The gun is drawn on Beeler for his failure to convince his accusers that chewing on an inch of cold, wet cigar violates neither the spirit nor the letter of Bullard's no-smoking sign. One thing leads to another, and another.
The reader should know immediately that Beeler had nothing to do with the fire that destroyed Bullard's hardware store, and that Bullard was not responsible for the explosion under the hood of Beeler's car. Another important fact is that there is no full-dress feud in The Feud. Beeler and Bullard are soon out of the picture, one with a fatal heart attack and the other with a nervous breakdown. But these misfortunes set in motion a series of coincidences and events.