Meeting Evil Read online

  Praise for Meeting Evil

  “The author creates a world in this book that is so corrupt, so consistently vicious, that innocence can glow visibly within his misunderstood protagonist. The plot gets nicely complicated… and the entire contraption claps together in a great, unpredictable, satisfying calamity.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Spare, meticulous prose… sharply evocative of human weakness and rage.”

  —The Washington Post

  Praise for Thomas Berger

  “Thomas Berger is a writer of enormous wit and incisive wisdom.”

  —San Francisco Review of Books

  “Thomas Berger is a magician… he never hits a false note. The effect is as if a snapshot has suddenly come to life, as we experience the sights and sounds and smells of that time and that place.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “An exquisitely subtle artist who can conjure character and emotion from the slightest verbal means.”

  —The New Republic

  “At his best… Thomas Berger can command attention solely as a lonely, insidious voice insisting… that fiction can be stranger than truth.”

  —Time

  “Thomas Berger is one of America’s most original novelists.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Thomas Berger is a magnificent novelist.”

  —National Review

  “Berger properly belongs up there with the living greats, with Burgess, Nabokov, and three or four others.”

  —The Cincinnati Enquirer

  “One of America’s most important comic artists.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “A cutting, ironic wit and a precision of detail so deadly it hurts when you laugh.”

  —Ms.

  “Humbling, eye-opening, and enormously funny.”

  —Newsweek

  Also by Thomas Berger

  Arthur Rex

  Being Invisible

  Best Friends

  Changing the Past

  The Feud

  The Houseguest

  Killing Time

  Little Big Man

  Neighbors

  Nowhere

  Orrie’s Story

  Regiment of Women

  The Return of Little Big Man

  Robert Crews

  Sneaky People

  Suspects

  Who Is Teddy Villanova?

  THE REINHART SERIES

  Crazy in Berlin

  Reinhart in Love

  Vital Parts

  Reinhart’s Women

  Thomas Berger

  MEETING EVIL

  A NOVEL

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS, NEW YORK

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 1992 by Thomas Berger

  Introduction copyright © 2003 by Jonathan Lethem

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition: 2003

  First Riverhead trade paperback movie tie-in edition: June 2012

  ISBN: 978-1-101-59667-8

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  To William G. Richards

  Berger’s Ambivalent Usurpations

  by Jonathan Lethem

  IS there any stronger evidence of the anhedonia of our reading culture than that Thomas Berger’s novels don’t flood airport bookstalls? There is simply no better way to destroy an hour or three. Before anything else let me say that here, reader, you are in for a treat. I envy you your first encounter, if that is what it is, with Meeting Evil, or with Berger’s oeuvre per se (and, yes, this is a fine place to start). This book is one of Berger’s most relentless and ingenious fictional “contraptions,” as a praiseful reviewer once dubbed it, and now that it is in your hands—turn to chapter one and be shanghaied—it truly needs, as they say, no further introduction.

  I’ll give it one anyway. I’m grateful for the chance to shout that Thomas Berger is one of America’s three or four greatest living novelists. I emphasize novelist, for Berger’s greatness resides in the depth and extensiveness of his commitment to and exploration of his chosen form. I can think of no other American writer more invested in and trusting of the means and materials of fiction qua fiction: scenes and sentences, chapters and paragraphs, and, above all, characters—their voices and introspections, their predicaments in fictional worlds. He’s cultivated this investment to the exclusion of all forms of topicality or sociology, autobiographical appeals to readerly interest, superficial “innovations,” or controversialism. Berger’s too interested in the mysteries of narrative to bother with metafiction, yet his world does possess a certain rubbery pleasure in its own artifice. He doesn’t bother to disguise fiction’s proscenium arch—his “realism,” such as it is, resides in his assiduous scrutiny of daily existence, at levels both psychological and ontological. Berger adores novels too much to play at their destruction or to be embarrassed at his participation in a tradition.

  Berger’s commitment has another aspect: apart from a scattering of short plays and stories, he’s devoted himself entirely to the novel and eschewed side work like journalism, screen-writing, or teaching. Nor has he spent his capital pontificating, issuing manifestos, attending conferences, or granting more than a small handful of interviews. What this may have cost him in terms of journalistic ink, who knows? I won’t speak glibly of “neglect,” though he certainly sells fewer books than do those writers I regard as his only peers, and, though not obscure, is less widely known. A few years ago I made the mistake, in writing an entry on Berger for a literary encyclopedia, of claiming that he’d fallen from a “critical and popular heyday” in the 1960s. Berger wrote me to gently correct my error, explaining that he’d never had a “heyday,” dragging out the sales figures to prove it. No, Berger’s hovered for fifty years in a middle distance, proof neither of the proposition that genius is always rewarded nor that it is universally overlooked. The paradoxical fate of a writer impossible to revive because h
e’s never been sufficiently neglected is somehow quite suitably Bergerian.

  That said, it’s impossible for others not to rage on Berger’s behalf for a larger share of attention and rewards. Take the words of the Pakistani-Texan novelist Zulfikar Ghose: “Novels whose subject matter is their greatest appeal are invariably vastly popular.… Novels which stand on their style alone win readers slowly, in little bands here and there, until the work becomes one of the layers which compose human consciousness. [This] explains why, among American novelists, Saul Bellow, who knows what to write about, is preferred to Thomas Berger, who knows how to write.… Berger is a novelist and nothing else.… Twenty or thirty years from now Bellow will be one of those obscure funny names one sees who were mistakenly awarded the Nobel Prize, like Pearl Buck, and Berger will be read seriously, like Henry James.”

  In material terms, Berger’s been unflinching in his dedication: twenty-two novels since his 1958 debut, Crazy in Berlin. His shelf of work, while unified both by his unmistakable gentle irony and his uncanny ear for musical collisions of high and low diction, effloresces in wild diversity: a quasi-Updikean quartet of novels following the life stages of a lumpen, angelic alter ego named Reinhart; a pair of shambolic historical-legendary epics, Little Big Man and Arthur Rex (the former, his best-known novel, now followed by a sequel); and a handful of loving demolitions of genre—the private-eye novel in Who Is Teddy Villanova?, utopian and dystopian fiction in Nowhere and Regiment of Women, and fables of wish fulfillment in Being Invisible and Changing the Past.

  The virtuosic novelty of those enterprises may sometimes distract readers and commentators from the core concerns of the majority of Berger’s novels. The remainder of his books are harder to pigeonhole or typify—though all of them develop motifs of power, victimization, and guilt in human affairs, and all exhibit the curious capacity of his fictional situations to shift like a weathervane between farcical misunderstanding and ominous, sadomasochistic abuse. Many, including Meeting Evil, impinge on the material of the crime novel, or policier, though they never reproduce the tone typical of those genres. (Meanwhile, the audience that savors crime in fiction has overlooked Berger, much as the tropical explorers, in the famous Mad magazine cover illustration, are unaware, as they scrutinize the trees, that they are huddled in the concavity of an enormous footprint.)

  These less categorizeable novels, with their nominally realist settings, and full of human blundering ranging from adultery and murder to badly cooked meals, comprise the strongest argument for Berger’s lasting importance, especially cumulatively. The sequence I have in mind begins with the monumental Killing Time, Berger’s fourth novel, which I’ve described elsewhere as “Jim Thomson rewritten by an American Flaubert.” That book, an inquiry into a beatific, existentially profound sociopath who regards himself as the enemy of time, contains as well the first of a series of portraits of faintly malicious, hugely pragmatic cops. Berger’s fascination with policemen—the guilt they inspire in introspective souls, the morbidity they indulge as a by-product of their mission, the mental ambiguity filters they necessarily adopt—is matched only by Alfred Hitchcock’s.

  Next come Sneaky People, Neighbors, and The Feud. Sneaky People and The Feud are a pair of large-ensemble Midwestern urban novels, full of fond reproductions of American vernacular speech in its vanished splendor, full of unsentimental cross sections of turf mostly abdicated by American novelists after Booth Tarkington. Neighbors (Berger’s favorite among his own books, partly for what he describes as the effortlessness of its composition) inaugurates a masterful triumvirate of novels of menace—its companions are The Houseguest and the book you now hold in your hands. Each of these three books is theatrical, tightly unified in time (and in the case of the two novels before Meeting Evil, in place as well). Each make a study of what I’d call ambivalent usurpation—uncanny scenarios wherein a terrifying struggle for power emerges from within a banal milieu. Each features a principal provocateur and a principal victim—but Berger is fascinated by the ways in which innocence and reserve are complicit with chaos and impulsivity. He makes a study of the malignancy of charisma but of the torpor of reflection as well. In the words of Reinhart: “People use us as we ask them to: this is life’s fundamental, and often the only, justice.” This theme of ambivalent usurpation—exchanges of unspecified guilt and obligation between pairs of human “doubles”—resonates with motifs in works by artists as apparently disparate as Dostoyevsky, Harold Pinter, Patricia Highsmith, Orson Welles and, yes, again, Hitchcock. It is typical of Berger that once his theme of doubleness has been established, rather than emphasize similarity between characters to a fatuous degree, he instead exercises his fascination with the fact that differing types do exist: however we might become ensnared by another, the lonely fact of self persists.

  Beyond any other literary influence or comradeship, the paradoxical logic by which Berger unfolds his scenes connects him above all to Franz Kafka. Too many contemporary writers kowtow to Kafka in blackface: ostentatiously dreamlike settings, Shadows and Fog-ian Eastern European atmosphere or diction. Berger engages with Kafka’s influence at a more native and universal level, by grasping the way Kafka reconstructed fictional time and causality to align it with his emotional and philosophical reservations about human life. Berger’s tone, like Kafka’s, never oversells paranoia or despair. Instead, Berger explores the fallibility of the human effort to feel justified or consoled in the gaze of any other being, with meticulous, even affectionate, gestures of reserve and regret. As in the elder writer, there is nothing so absurd or heartbreaking as the disparity between intention and act, or speech. The result of Berger’s patient domestication of Kafka’s method is, actually, never dreamlike. Instead, Berger locates that part of our waking life which unfolds in the manner of Zeno’s paradox, where it is possible only to fall agonizingly short in any effort to be understood, or to do good. In doing so, he illuminates what it was that necessitated Kafka’s exaggerations. And by splitting the difference halfway back to daylight—and setting his daylit persecutions amid strip malls and suburban developments—he unnerves us even more deeply.

  Patricia Highsmith is the only other American writer I can think of who has attained this profound incorporation of Kafka, particularly in her A Dog’s Ransom and The Cry of the Owl. The irony is that the justly acclaimed Highsmith does little else that is more than competent, while Berger offers this and so many other pleasures: paradox, wit, slyness, and the diction and vocabulary of a Henry James meets H. L. Mencken. Berger’s as brilliant a student of American talk as Nabokov or DeLillo, and his favorite sentences, especially in dialogue, pivot on fragments of tabloid squawk elevated to odd majesty by their surrounding syntax. Indeed, to believe Berger’s own (suspect) testimony, language is his only subject. Among his countless eloquent demurrals of discussion of the moral, philosophical, or psychological implications of his work, my favorite is one given to Brooks Landon, Berger’s most important critic and explicator: “I have never believed that I work in the service of secular rationalism (the man of good will, the sensible fellow, the social meliorist who believes the novel holds up a mirror to society, etc.). I am essentially a voyeur of copulating words.”

  Those demurrals reflect Berger’s distrust of the shifting ground of language, and his horror of abstractions and false certainties, which preclude nearly any human gesture less immediate than the cooking by one person of a delicious meal for another. All else is laden with presumption at best, grim manipulation at worst: every person is surely full of purposes, and Berger suspects his own as direly as anyone else’s (“Remember that you will understand my work best when you are at your most selfish,” he has also told Landon). The letters that I am so fortunate as to receive from Berger are full of enthusiasms: for character actors like Elisha Cook Jr. and Laird Cregar; for Superman comics; for Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time; for the novels of Barbara Pym, Marcel Proust, and Frank Norris; and as well for some but not all of the writers and fil
mmakers to whom I’ve presumed to compare him. Perhaps the feast of culture is another port in the storm of existence, though Berger’s main characters are never artists or writers, and those few creative types that do appear are usually buffoons or ogres if not both.

  Brooks Landon has explored Berger’s sustaining relationship to Nietzsche, whose delineation of “slave” and “master” personalities certainly presages Berger’s interdependent victims and victimizers. Another astute Berger critic, John Carlos Rowe, has discerned an engagement with existentialism of the type which was fashionable in postwar culture, when Berger began writing (and which can be seen to lay the ground for those rebellions of the 1960s, literary and otherwise, that Berger conspicuously resisted). I’m not qualified in philosophical commentary, but it seems unmistakable that the murderers in Killing Time and Meeting Evil, so unalike in other ways, nevertheless both reflect a fascination with existentialist rationales for motiveless murder, à la Crime and Punishment and Camus’ The Stranger and Hitchcock’s Rope. What’s clear, too, is that in his novels of menace Berger is compelled by and attracted to his provocateur villains for their dynamism, and for their talent for testing the certainties of everyday life, the rote morals of policemen, etc. And yet, unlike the typical novelists of Berger’s own generation, the Keseys and Kerouacs, and even the Updikes and Roths, the dissident against social complacency is never Berger’s hero. In the case of Meeting Evil, Berger has confessed to me that while he had to consult a copy to even recall John Felton’s name, Richie is one of his favorite among his own characters—yet elsewhere Berger has enthusiastically endorsed the verdict of the title: Richie is evil, and must be destroyed. What Berger resists in social rebellion is its resemblance to what it attacks: its self-validating smugness, its readiness to manipulate in its own cause, its cobbled-together moral jargon, its bottom-line disinterest in the mystery of daily existence, its poor listening skills.