Millvillers and Hornbeckers

By R. Z. Sheppard

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.

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

"In the rough-and-tumble of life Reverton had learned to anticipate troublemakers. The place to be trained in what human beings were capable of was a toilet in a public building if you were the custodian who had to clean it up every nighttime. For years Rev had been one of the janitors at the county courthouse up in Way land. He had been let go after the accident, which had incapacitated him for some months ... For reasons of pride, and to justify his carrying the pistol, Rev let the family think him a railroad dick. He did live in Hamburg, in a fleabag hotel near the railroad yard, but whenever he wasn't down in Millville at, formerly, his cousin's store and now the Bullard house, he was in the public library, doing research into various subjects that interested him: the extraction of gold from sea water, Asiatic techniques for training the will, magnetism, and the Pope's secret plan to introduce into the non-Catholic areas of the world an army of secret agents whose mission it was to poison the -- public reservoirs." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.