Customer Reviews

Sneaky People

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Drawing from nostalgic middle America in the 1930s, Berger writes about a rogue car salesman Buddy Sandifer who plots to kill his skinny wife so he can marry his sumptuous lover Laverne. As foul as Buddy is and as important his scheme is to the plot, he is not really the focus of the novel. The real focus is Buddy's son Ralph, a sympathetic adolescent overwrought by natural lusts and in possession of an honesty and integrity that his father lacks. It is those chapters told from Ralph's POV where the novel really shines for at its heart Sneaky People is, for all its lusty rogues and ironic twists and turns, a sweet and tender novel about a wholesome boy awakening to his sexuality and connecting that sexuality to a gallant form of manhood that his father, sadly, never showed him.

Only Berger, a true original, could pull off a novel like this: Part seedy, malicious plotline, part perverted, unctuous characters, and part tender loss of innocence story--told with the sneaky, ironic syntax that Berger is so famous for.

One last point: The childhood friendship between Ralph and his vulgar, bullying neighbor Hauser seems to have been used for a later novel, when they've reached middle-age, in what for me is Berger's best novel, titled Best Friends.

Berger is a very acute observer of modern (1930s) American life -from flogging off used cars, to the gun culture, to growing up as a teenage boy... There are quiet laughs throughout the book - and some not so quiet - but guaranteed smiles on every page, as much from the mad situations he describes as from his restrained choice of language. He is a fine writer and I will be seeking out his other works.

A master of sublime plot twists that are more than stirring they jolting, Thomas Berger shows off his storytelling talents in Sneaky People.

At the heart of this story is an all-business used car dealer in the years before the Depression who wants his wife dead so he can move in with his favorite prostitute-turned-girlfiend.

Buddy is certain his oddball but ever-faithful wife is a insufferable bore. What he's not sure of is if his half-wit mechanic has the brainpower to pull off the hit.

One is left wondering what gives Sneaky People its knockout punch. Is it that beneath the surface of its glib, ordinary characters you discover the poetically quirky and deranged? Or is the serenditipous nature that it's unlikely heros get from A to point B?

Like his masterful "The Feud," this novel drops us into small-town America in the 30s and surrounds us with dolts. In "The Feud," the Bullards and the Beelers took umbrage over every perceived slight in a twisted version of "Romeo and Juliet" peopled by morons. Here Berger narrows his focus on the Sandifers: Buddy, who owns a used car lot, his wife Naomi, and his son Ralph. Oh, and Buddy's floozy Laverne. They're a step up from the Bullards and the Beelers on the mental food chain, but still not finalists for the MacArthur Prize. Berger's gift for lowbrow period dialogue and characterization make this a comic gem with a dollop of surprising pathos. Think Gene Sheperd with a foul mouth and you've got Berger's measure-- or Peter de Vries with a foot in the gutter.

The publication of Thomas Berger's ¨Sneaky People¨ in Kindle Format is a welcome event, just as the snail's pace with which his catalog as a whole is being reissued is nothing short of criminal. After all, Berger is the author of such celebrated and stylistically diverse books as ¨Little Big Man,¨¨Arthur Rex,¨and the ¨Rheinhardt¨trilogy, not to mention the book being reviewed here, as well as¨Neighbors,¨¨The Feud,¨ and many more. Well, it is by no means a perfect world, as Berger would be the first to acknowlege. Spleen vented, let's move on to the book at hand.

¨Sneaky People¨ is one of several Berger novels, including ¨The Feud¨and ¨Neighbors,¨ which takes the reader on a Cook's Tour of of the mid-20th Century American middle class. He reveals his characters in all their mendacity, mediocrity, unintentional hilarity, and in many instances their tenderness and basic goodness. They are often as well-intentioned as others are reprehensible. That these redeeming qualities frequently are the products of their ignorance or misapprehensions about the world in which they live in no way diminishes them in Berger's view. In fact, their very dunderheadedness, as it were, contributes to our empathy for them. And the banality of the evil that inhabits the hearts of many of the characters is often as hilarious in the telling as it is horrifying in the contemplation.

Buddy Sandlor is the owner of a used car lot. In Berger's world, Buddy's profession alone would, in any just world, qualify him for the electric chair, or at least a long stretch in prison. Of course it doesn't, but Buddy, with his sharpster's misplaced self-confidence and dim-witted arrogance, does his level best to balance the scales of justice. With no more consideration, moral or practical, than he would give to fleecing a customer unfortunate enough to wander onto his car lot, Buddy decides to have his wife murdered so that he can marry his mistress. It's not that Buddy loves his somewhat dim but decent paramour. He simply decides that all things considered it's the best, and more importantly the easiest, way to stop his side dish from constantly nagging him about his promise to get a divorce. That in his hubris and basic lack of intelligence he gives the execution of this execution about as much thought as what he plans to have for lunch, leads to serious and extremely comic complications for Buddy and most of those who happen to cross his path.

On the other side of the moral universe we have Buddy's adolescent son, Buddy's mistress, and Buddy's wife. Each in his or her own way is just trying to get through life with no more pain than necessary. By turns innocent of the ways of the world, hardened but not hard, and, in the case of Buddy's wife, more shrewd than most suppose, they careen off Buddy's grand plan like bumper cars at a carnival. Some suffer less unpredictable redirection than others, but all are effected to varying degrees.

That Berger can render these three characters as multi-dimensional, with deep flaws and sometimes unflattering personalities, while at the same time allowing us to feel for them, is a tribute to his understanding that most people are some mixture of angel and schmuck. They are full of contradictions that can hurt like hell, but that can also, at least in a novel, be hilariously funny.

Highly recommended.

I'm a big fan of Berger, but Sneaky People disappointed me. The thesis, in a nutshell: never shoot anything before thinking it through. You will ask if I oversimplify, but for this book I think not. The redeaming qualities are in how the tales are told. It was fun to peek at pre-WWII America: memories of stuff my parents' aunts and uncles told me enlivened the narrative. A younger reader will not have that. I was propelled to the finish by little more than the excellent wordsmithing. In general, I really like Berger. His 'Arthur Rex' is one of my very favorites, for lots of reasons. But 'Sneaky People' did not make me stay up past bedtime nor be late for work. Civilization will not fall if you give this a pass.