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As in Neighbors, situations can always get worse, and funnier. Beeler's son Tony, a nearsighted weight lifter, defends his mother's honor by slugging a rude Millville cop. This, in turn, makes it more difficult for Tony to court Eva, Bullard's buxom 13-year-old daughter. Bullard's nasty son Junior gets hold of Cousin Rev's pistol and is transformed into a menacing big shot ("It was funny how carrying a gun made you feel as if you were dreaming"). In Hornbeck, Beeler's daughter Bernice comes home from the big city bragging about her sophisticated life as a cashier in a movie theater. In truth, she is pregnant and needs to find a local boy who can be convinced that he is the father. Rev stops a bank robbery but, unfortunately, also a bullet.
It is characteristic of Berger to endow some of his most unappealing characters with vitality and strength. Rev is a paranoid crank but the only person in the book to take heroic action. To keep matters consistently bizarre, Berger describes the codger's funeral through the eyes of Junior, the teen-age lout: "As he watched the bronze box being lowered into the grave he could not help thinking of that little ditty that went: Your eyes fall in/ Your teeth fall out/ The worms crawl over/ Your nose and mouth. Dying was a lousy thing, and he intended to avoid it, for its inevitability seemed only theoretical to him. How did they know that you couldn't live forever? Had anybody ever tried it?"
The Feud as a tale is hardly distinguished. Berger's telling is. His language, rich in prewar idiom, is precise and laconic, the perfect foil to his slapstick plot. At first encounter, the characters appear to have been made of pig bladders, but the deeper their predicaments, the more convincing they become. The romance between Bernice and Ernie, a Hornbeck layabout, has the ring of lowlife truth. Says a sincere Ernie after a night of backseat love and a bottle of Rock 'n' Rye: "I'm sure trying to figure out a way to tell you what I want to without hurting your feelings by talking dirty, but it ain't easy."
Writers have similar problems of finding the right style. Berger, once again, has found the solution. His work may not win any prizes for the celebration of the indomitable human spirit, but The Feud is an affectionate cheer for all the peeves, itches and dreams that make most people tick.
—By R.Z. Sheppard
Excerpt