Word: berger
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...BERGER'S IMMUNE POWER...
...DIET, Berger...
...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...
...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...
...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...