The Houseguest : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: gerbil food
Review: A comedy of manners? Whose manners exactly?

My irritation with this book began with its frayed structure and a handful of supension of disbelief problems and built into a fury through 200-some sad pages of awkward narration and non-sequitor plot progressions. Houseguest was poorly executed, perhaps because it was poorly conceived:

Nobody talks the way Berger's characters talk, and I never felt for a second that anyone would act the way he has them act. Are we to believe the the five most effete morons in all the world arrived at the same vacation house for the weekend? More likely Berger is attempting to pillory some (poorly) imagined social type, but he never bothers to put flesh on the characters' bones and make them the least bit believable. The whole thing was alternately tedious and tortured, and I would have put it down after 50 pages if it hadn't been guaranteed to show on an English exam.

By the end I so resented the few hours I'd been forced spend with The Houseguest that I spent the following semester feeding it, a page per day, to my roommate's gerbil, Morty. Morty enthusiastically shredded it all for bedding, no doubt getting more enjoyment and better use out of it than I did.

Rating:
Summary: The Limits of Hospitality
Review: It begins innocuously enough, with an explanation of how the ominous process began which led to the decision to kill a man. And not just any man: a guest. And not just any guest: a guest who is a "superb cook" and an adept car mechanic and an experienced lifeguard, and has cause to exercise all these skills and more in the service of his hosts and hostesses. As it begins, so it unfolds, that something which appears normal becomes twisted and unpredictable. A family spending time at their beach house is sucked into a vortex of horror and danger which is largely an illusion, and conclude the execution of their guest is the only way out of the vortex.

As is customary with Berger the narrator is the most amusing voice, especially when he employs a 19th century formality. When Lydia, one of the family, is saved from drowning it's as though the producers of "Baywatch" had told Charles Dickens exactly what they wanted and he did his best to give it to them: "'Lydia!'a stern, almost military voice cried down. It was the person, a man who had earlier been kissing her, not for erotic purposes but to claim her for life; ... performing the emergency maneuvers by which she might be revived."

And after her revival: "She was offended by (his) tone, but in the next instant remembered it was he who saved her life and so acquired a certain authority over it. She wept softly, humiliated by the memory of the powerlessness into which she had fallen with the first grasp of the undertow."

The narrator expresses the crude facile TVish thoughts of each character in stately, elegant turns of speech worthy of the greatest masters of the form. All characters that is, except Chuck, the houseguest, who remains an enigma. We never are privy to his thoughts, only to his speech and actions, which swing wildly from flip to analytic, from accomodating to provocative, from solicitous to menacing and back again. No one even knows who invited him to the house, yet he is virtually omniscent, dominating each encounter with the others, laying bare their secrets and reveling in their discomfiture.

One finds this delightfully bizarre comic sensibility in the opening of many novels--novels which usually degenerate into tedious formulaic moralizing. Berger maintains the magic to the very end.

Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Comedy of Manners
Review: It is perhaps an unfortunate state of affairs in our nations's literary when books such as Thomas Berger's The Houseguest are out of print. Berger is a brilliant satirist, as anyone who read comic masterpieces like Little Big Man, Neighbors, or Sneaky People can attest. The Houseguest ranks right up there with the best of his work - it is funny, dark, mysterious, and absurd while still keeping the reader interested in the plot.

Chuck Burgoyne appears to be the perfect houseguest at a rich family's vacation beachhome. He has a delicate touch in the kitchen, seems to keep to himself, and makes very modest demands on his hosts. However things start to go awry, and the family nervously begins to wonder just who invited this mysterious houseguest, and what does he intend to do with them. Like Berger's Neighbors, the characters in this short novel become prisoners in their own home, looking to the ineffectual men of the house to save the day from Chuck and his apparent evil plans.

The plot seems to unravel a bit toward the end, but The Houseguest was a very wickedly funny novel, resonant with typical goofball Berger characters who are prisnoers in their own complacent lives. If you are new to Berger read this one, and read Little Big Man and Sneaky People. You will become a fan of this national treasure who has unfairly been forgotten by a significant portion of the reading American public.