Mad Though Not Madcap

...The chase is on Several teams of rummy newspapermen work day and night to increase the vulgarity of it all, sucking stories from the not-so-bereaved family to feed the res publica Betty, the hard-headed surviving sister, discovers yellow journalism is her art form, appeases the reporters and waits for the book publishers to line up, her alcoholic father would do the same if he could only remember Sniffing trouble, Joe ducks out in favor of his own mother, a good sort although a bit of a kook She suggests as an alias for him, "Randolph Binoculars...

...The police are hard on his heels One in particular, Tierney, will prove to be Joe's reluctant prosecutor, contessor, and, in going after Betty, his replacement as a lover It's all part of the job But Joe, following a bout of memory, decides right is right and turns himself in at another venal newspaper He demands his just deserts several thousand volts...

...The thud novel, Little Big Man, starred Jack Crabb as a plucky long-lived vagabond in our 19th-century West There was a book' Crabb (the Little Big Man of the title, so dubbed by the Indians he spent much of his life with) was Reinhart's opposite in physique, was more given to derring-do, was if anything even more captivating His exploits, from tangling with Wild Bill Hickok to surviving the Battle of Little Bighorn, make up an unprecedented version of cowboys-and-Indians, it's a furious, guile-ridden Wild West as only the originals could have known and as only Berger could have conjured The details are as accurate as the humor is raunchy All in all, a largess of personage and happenstance that will not soon be tor-gotten Whereas Reinhart and Crabb were people that Berger obviously liked having around, Joe Detweiler is not Berger cares so little for Joe that he did not trouble to make him a full-fledged creature Traits are put out like laundry on a line, the man who wears those garments, curious as they might be when pinned up there, is unknown The first error, to my mind, was to make Joe resolutely humorless Berger excells at the human comedy, and in discarding wit he has lost more than he could ever hope to gain Despite his one night of fury, Joe is essentially a ponderer, as Reinhart and Crabb were not Not a one of his musings or theories is of any real interest Although it is not impossible, it is difficult to be interested in a madman who is not madcap, and Berger does all too little to help us The difference between Joe and Reinhart or Crabb is the difference between a case study and a case The other characters have more obligations to their stereotypes than to the story The reporters drink and scrap with all the degeneracy of their 1930s movieland forefathers The cops are surly, dedicated, and Irish, the cheesecake victim was cut out of True Confessions, the licentious mother we have met in every place of public accommodation since Cervantes, and the lawyer is an updated William Jennings Bryan Only Betty has a chance at breaking out of her mold (the spiteful sibling), but Berger gives up on her half-way through...

...The title means more to Berger than a label for this particular book For those of us who wait with Berger for the next success, I suggest another reading of Little Big Man, currently in paperback It's worth every minute...

...Mad Though Not Madcap KILLING TIME By Thomas Beiger Dial Press 372 pp $5 95 Reviewed by JIB FOWLES Instructor, American Language Institute, New York University A savage killer is at large' homicidal maniac" to the press, "a nut" to the investigating police He has spent Christmas Eve garroting a young thing and her mom, and finished up by driving a screwdriver into their hapless boarder The culprit we are soon to learn, is a previous boarder named Joe Detweiler, a man not without endowments Besides working at taxidermy and sculpture, Joe is something of a thinker, what with his ruminations on Time and Realization And a nominal believer m love and remorse, in law and punishment In fact, Joe exults in most of the artifacts of this life??with the exception of his own intimate property (Much time goes into the quest after the doctor who will castrate him ) The methods of Joe's madness are not those of this world...

...What kind of novel do we have here9 Certainly not the rich picaresque book Berger has treated us to three times in a row Those looking for more Berger will regret their purchase A murder mystery9 We know who did it almost immediately A thriller9 No thrills A psychological crime study, a cousin of Crime and Punishment'' It is not worth the author's time, nor ours, to get inside Joe's bean because Joe has nothing to tell us about ourselves All things considered, it looks suspiciously like the familiar genre known as the contract-filler...

...So it is poor Joe Detweiler who must carry the ball, a waterboy trying to do the job of Reinhart the Heavy or Crabb the Scooter Since he has little to offer, perhaps a good plot will save the day Sorry, the story is but fibrillation a scheme without rhythm or focus or struggle The tension of pursuit is missing (Joe catches himself at the mid-point of the book), and the drama of the courtroom is foregone Even those hackneyed doings would have been better than the little the author gives us The impotency of Berger's effort is reflected in the too-brief paragraphs and plodding sentences The hearty style of his earlier books comes back in the rarest of periods "Suddenly the seat of his worn trousers lost its purchase on the banquette and he slid under the table by three-quarters Occasionally, in what appears to be a spell of self-mockery, Berger gives out with a parody of that style "Tierney asked his wife to return the fried eggs to the pan for a once over lightly to coagulate their mucosity " For the most part, the reader is subjected to sentences befitting the tedium of the book as a whole...

...Joe's lawyer, corpulant and savvy, the nation's best, is unwilling to have his reputation marred by a death sentence A battle of wits (eccentric versus maniac) ensues, and in the end the lawyer has persuaded both murderer and court We leave Joe tickled pink to spend the rest of his days in a cell...

...Berger is the author of three previous novels, and while none carried him to the top of the Best Seller lists or insured him underground fame, each was an improved voice of his considerable talent and each rightly swelled his readership The first two??Crazy in Balm and Rein-hart in Love??aired Reinhart, an engaging lummox who abided being a half-step behind the rest of the world Reinhart was neither a comedian nor a scapegoat, but he was never far from things comic of painful A sample Reinhart at homecoming failed to separate his myopic father from the waiting room bums Like most of us, Reinhart could not qualify as hero or anti-hero, he got through, and Berger set it all down in wry and superbly-told accounts...

...It's Thomas Berger, an old friend to many novel readers, who stands accused Sad to say, his book is criminally bad...