Dicey Clams Nowhere

By Christopher Porterfield

Like Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Thomas Berger's principality of Saint Sebastian can be found on no map, but its significance will be clear to any reader with a sufficiently jaundiced eye. Tucked away in Middle Europe, somewhere between Johann Strauss's Vienna and Kafka's Prague, the country subsists on a precarious economy of universal credit. Politics and journalism are against the law; pederasty is condoned, but rudeness is considered a crime against the state. The government bureaucracy includes the absurdly named Ministry of Clams, a sort of dead-letter office for all insoluble problems, whose minister believes that attempting to solve them would be "a mockery of the human condition." Blond-haired people, regarded as inferior, are downtrodden. Under Saint Sebastian's Enlightenment, the schools offer a nonstop curriculum of American B movies of the 1930s and '40s, with nuns serving as ushers and priests cranking the projectors.

Berger, author of such novels as Little Big Man, Neighbors and Reinhart's Women, surveys this turf through the device of a mock international spy story. An American agency known as "the Firm," which may or may not be the CIA, wants to know if it should throw its support to the Sebastiani Liberation Front. To find out, it recruits none other than Russel Wren, a onetime college English instructor, would-be playwright and sometime private investigator, as well as the protagonist of Berger's 1977 Who Is Teddy Villanova? Wren's invincible innocence would seem a poor recommendation for the job. But as his recruiter points out, "Obviously if you've survived in New York City you know how to lie and cheat and dissemble: spying should be just your meat." Wren goes off to more of a welcome than he bargains for from Olga, the Amazonian ringleader of the Liberation Front, and less help than he needs from Clyde McCoy, American drunk and pornographer, the Firm's resident operative in Saint Sebastian.

The mission also proves dicey for Berger. His writing, as always, is polished, but some vital tension is missing from Nowhere. The author's style of fastidious disdain -- half repelled, half fascinated -- seems to need a setting of solid, preferably seamy realism, like Reinhart's tacky heartland or Neighbors' fringe suburbia. Free floating over the fantastic topography of Saint Sebastian, he tends to lose his sting. Moreover, between streaks of zaniness, Berger allows Wren to lapse into his old college lecturing habits. Underlining a point about Saint Sebastian's preposterousness that would be best left implicit, Wren asks, "Did things make any more sense elsewhere? Or, to be fair, any less?"

The scenes on the gritty sidewalks of Manhattan allow Berger to find a more congenially savage mode, incorporating an authentic urban snarl into his impeccable diction. His hapless narrator enjoys perfect security by disguising himself as a wino ("That there is no effective form of defense against a derelict is an irreducible truth of city life"). Even the deposed Prince of Saint Sebastian hustles a string of personal appearances, with the Firm as his agent. But these passages make up a mere fraction of the book. As for the rest, one can only agree with a neighborhood hooker who unburdens herself to Wren after he escapes a bomb planted in his apartment by the Liberation Front. "I don't know, Rus," she says, "sometimes I think it oughta be better than this."