Neighbors – Thomas Berger
When I was a teenager we lived in Greece. In the Embassy, there was a “put and take” library that I would scour looking for regency romance novels. One day, I found what was obviously a dirty book–and naturally, I sneaked it home in my magenta L.L Bean backpack with the reflective stripe. I was thrilled. But when I finally got home, locked my bedroom door (even though no one was home), and pulled out the ragged paperback, I realized that it was so abstracted out that it made no sense at all. I can’t remember much about the book now, except for the fact that it had odd names for all the dirty bits and featured scenes that a 14-year old in search of some simple smut found bewildering. I had forgotten about that book until I closed the cover on Berger’s Neighbors.
Earl Keese is a typical suburbanite with a stereotypical life: He commutes to the city on the train, is relatively happily married, has a college-age daughter he adores. Add to this the fact that he is a pompous bore.
On Earl’s street, there are only two houses. And he has new neighbors. He and his wife Enid are discussing whether to invite them to drinks when one of them appears at the door. Her name is Ramona and she quickly tells Earl that he’s too fat–a harbinger of the type of exchange to come. Then her partner Harry comes barreling in. Earl makes the fatal mistake of inviting them to dinner–only there is no food in the house and all the shops in the village are closed. From here commences what some call a comedy of errors between Harry and Ramona and Earl. Is Earl paranoid that Harry and Ramona are out to get him? Whose side is Enid on, anyway? The novel descends into outright guerilla warfare, but Earl soon realizes that he likes Harry and Ramona more than he likes his own family.
And I had the same bewildered reaction to this as I did when I was 14, cracking open the covers of that dirty novel. Earl’s paranoia is clear; so is the fact that this is a parody of suburban life. What is less, clear, however, is what we are supposed to make of it. The novel lurches from one improbable scene to the next. This improbability is, of course, purposeful–but for all its purpose, it is no less incomprehensible. I have read different descriptions of Neighbors: comic, hysterically funny, a witty tour de force, a brilliant indictment of suburban life. It goes on and on. But you know, I didn’t find this funny in the slightest. Instead, I found it inexplicably bizarre. And it just seemed so pointless.