Meeting Evil Read Free

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.
    Berger isn’t an experimental writer in any of the usual senses of the word. But in his ferocious devotion to paradox and irony as investigatory tools, his fiction consists of an endless, irresolvable experiment into what can be translated out of the morass of lived human days into useful and entertaining stories—though Berger would likely argue that no story can be useful, and then jibe that no one was intended to be entertained beyond himself. Berger’s uncertainty is his being, and his implement. The uniquely vertiginous nature of a page of his fiction is testament to the daily experiment of his art.
    In the Bergerian world, masks are often peeled away to reveal further masks, yet just as often what was mistaken for a mask turns out to be a face. No irony is conclusive enough not to give way to a deeper irony, and the deepest of all is the realization that first impressions are sometimes adequate, or that it is the rare quandary that is actually improved by sustained pondering. Fate is for the embracing. As a Berger policeman once wisely remarked, “Death can happen to anyone.” No one, however grotesque or ill-mannered, is so remote from the human predicament that he is ineligible for the occasional epiphanic insight, yet no one, however saintly or patient, is likely to be able to make use of the insights at hand in the flurry of a practical transaction involving another person. Just when Bergerian loneliness seems ubiquitous, contact is unexpectedly made, and though Berger’s sex scenes are often barren and harsh his tender evocations of romantic hope and yearning may be the least appreciated aspect of his books. No grace can ever be earned, in Berger’s world, but it does fall like precious rain here and there.
    Meeting Evil
is on the unmerciful side of his shelf, but odd, sunny moments break through even so—it wouldn’t be Berger otherwise. It is also relatively spare, in the manner of all his later books apart from the
Little Big Man
sequel. The structure, hard to discern on the first roller-coaster plunge through, is elegant and ironclad: In the first section John Felton is persecuted and harassed by the police, by bystanders, and by his wife; in the third section, he is abandoned by all of them. Richie’s incursion is the only consistent note in his reality, and it is one of purest mayhem; the only person responsive to John is a madman. Between, in the book’s second section, Berger delves into Richie’s self-justifying viewpoint, in pages as lean and shocking as an X ray of the brain of a shark. In those, we learn that the madman listens to John for the simplest reason: he likes him.
    Berger is now seventy-eight years old. It’s a rare privilege to witness a great novelist’s arc beyond such an age, but Berger is still unflagging, and it may not be too much to wish for several more novels. The most recent books are gentler, more forgiving, and often serve as overt or covert consolidations of earlier sequences in his work. In this manner,
Orrie’s Story
returned to the midwestern panoramas of
Sneaky People
and
The Feud,
while the almost completely overlooked
Suspects
(has it even had a paperback edition?) revisits the sincere and troubled (though, in inquisitory method, malicious) policemen of
Killing Time
while excusing them the duty of confronting an existential superman. And, just as the fourth Reinhart novel,
Reinhart’s Women,
sheltered that beset character from the historical strife of the first three books, his newest,
Best Friends,
may be seen partly as a gentle capstone to the three novels of menace that include
Meeting Evil.
In it, the twinned characters, usurper and usurpee (can you tell them apart?), meet not as strangers but as