A House Is Not a Home

By Paul Gray

NEIGHBORS by Thomas Berger; Delacorte; 275 pages; $9.95

The arrival of new neighbors is likely to brush even the most stable of home owners with a tinge of paranoia. Property values are at stake, after all, not to mention the territorial imperative. Will the newcomers possess large marauding dogs or, worse, teen-age children? Will they fill up their front yard with rusting automobiles, set up a permanent garage sale in their driveway, sell cosmetics or encyclopedias door to door, deal hard drugs, paint their house pink, fire pistols randomly at passing cars and pedestrians . . . ? Such fears usually remain unrealized, but they still retain the power to induce night sweats, anxiety attacks during the hour of the wolf. Having horrid neighbors seems a small problem, given the generous range of human suffering, until they actually move in.

In his tenth novel Author Thomas Berger claims squatter's rights to the plot of the beleaguered household. Earl Keese, middle-aged and overweight, lives with his wife Enid smack at the end of a cul-de-sac somewhere in exurbia. Their plans for a normal Friday night have been made without reckoning on Harry and Ramona, a younger couple newly ensconced in the only other house on the block. Ramona appears first, while Enid is in the kitchen seeing to supper, and makes some lewd advances toward Earl.

He invites her to stay for supper, only to learn from Enid that they have nothing to serve but frozen succotash. Next comes Harry, a blond, muscular lout, eagerly accepting the invitation that Ramona has relayed. Earl is abashed and thus vulnerable to Harry's demand for money (to buy takeout food) keys (Harry claims that his own car has a broken fuel pump).

Something tells Earl not to give money and car to a total stranger, but "to have an outright enemy as one's nearest neighbor, when one lived at the termination of a dead-end road, with only a wooded hollow beyond, a weed-field across the street, was unthinkable." What follows during the next 24 hours suggests that Earl is right to worry. Bad enough that Ramona accuses him of trying to rape her and that Harry claims to be the victim of his homosexual advances; worse that Enid placidly believes both charges. Keese keeps throwing his new neighbors out, and they keep coming back. Suddenly, nothing in his life works the way it should. He phones some old friends to seek help in at least getting Harry and Ramona out of his house. "I don't want to, "replies one. "It would bore me, and I never do anything boring if I can help it." A servile old auto mechanic whom Earl calls for service starts insulting him. It occurs to Earl that "the more he sought aid, the more scores he had to settle. He was some how antagonizing the entire world merely by trying to defend himself." His beloved daughter Elaine comes home from college, apparently expelled because of thievery. Earl is shocked and saddened by her alleged kleptomania: "It is certainly an obstacle in her path to achievement." Elaine, for her part, seems to adore Harry and Ramona and to blame Earl for the lethal atmosphere about the house.

She decides to leave: "The idea is to get away from you, Dad, while I can still walk . . . I'm too young to die needlessly while on a weekend visit with my parents."

Berger trots out all this absurdity at a wickedly effective pace.

He quickly conditions the reader to s expect the unexpected but manages to be consistently surprising never theless, introducing new twists and outrages that not even the most warped spectator could have foreseen. The novel adopts a formal, almost fussy style to convey lunacy, as if Berger were describing low deeds to a maiden aunt. At one point, Earl finds himself face down in a swamp, having been punched from behind by Harry. Berger writes: "He was not paralyzed, but someone's large foot was planted in the middle of his back. Owing to this impediment he could not rise.

He could, by lifting his chin, raise his nostrils high enough above the mire to breathe, but it was painful, owing to his sore back-of-neck. He now greatly regretted not having killed Harry."

Neighbors is not at all interested in being socially redeeming, and those who read books to gain warm feelings or philosophic nuggets will come away from this one empty-handed and probably angry. Berger has tucked away no meanings here, provided no key to get at the order hidden behind all the slapstick. He raises the possibility that Earl, not his tormentors, may be bananas, but anyone who takes this seriously will find everything twice as senseless as before. What Berger has produced is a tour de force, his most successfully sustained comic narrative since Little Big Man (1964). Like the best black humor of the 1960s, Neighbors offers a version of reality skewed just enough to give paranoia a good name. -- Paul Gray

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