Perpetual Sucker
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Perpetual Sucker Vital Parts By Thomas Berger Richard W. Baron Books. 432 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell Thomas Berger has just brought out this third volume of his Rein-hart trilogy...
...Yet this Rightist bigot is delighted to join forces with Reinhart's Leftist son to do in the moderates...
...It is, moreover, often difficult to tell whether Reinhart is a parody or the author's spokesman...
...These two charlatans are so manifestly unsuccessful in their activities that Reinhart is the only person credulous enough to go along with their freezing project...
...his predicaments are no more serious than those in Peanuts...
...The most thoroughly unpleasant character in his experience is his son, Blaine, a young hippie militant who harangues him as a fascist...
...The young speak like comic-strip caricatures of hippies, while Reinhart's thoughts tend toward long, ungrammatical, awkward sentences which must be blamed on the author's style...
...He has developed a masochistic pleasure in talking about his immunity to success...
...more, it represents a Yahoo portrait of the culture quite as repulsive as anything Berger has set out to satirize...
...Raven, a crooked lawyer who declaims: "We have been the recipient of the scum of all lands, drink-rotted Irishmen, Neapolitan thugs, pigfaced Heinie draft-dodgers, and the cretinous coolies from Asia who cannot iron a shirt without leaving scorchmarks...
...The problem with Vital Parts is that its hero is no Candide in this worst of all possible worlds, but merely a Charlie Brown...
...Once Reinhart has agreed to be frozen, however, and has two weeks of unlimited cash to live it up, he suddenly finds himself in tune with the world he despised...
...Similarly, Life appeals to Mark Twain when it calls the hero, Reinhart, "so American that he makes Huckleberry Finn look like a Bulgarian immigrant" and, further, calls Berger "as accomplished a satirist as we have...
...At 44, Carlo Reinhart is a total failure: unable to hold a job, despised by his wife and son, ignored by women, harassed by policemen, and treated like a child by his mother...
...like its hero, it is desperately trying to keep up with, or at least to understand, the modern world, and is always several steps behind...
...Blacks may not last much longer, either...
...As he puts it, "Nasty people are easily handled...
...When his son denounces war, the father can only counter with nostalgic memories of the occupation of Berlin...
...Sweet's young secretary, with whom Reinhart is having an affair, remarks casually: "Jews are out, I think...
...Policemen, who used to arrest him for driving two miles over the speed limit, now salute him as he drives by at 100, nuns invite him for dates, and the young become conservative in his presence...
...Then there is Reinhart's father-in-law...
...The doctor is, in fact, a survivor of the concentration camps, and his secret is simply that he has no license to practice medicine in America...
...The really sinister person is the saint, with whom every association insures your being further damned...
...Reinhart is a perpetual sucker for appearances, and the novel is a chronicle of his constant discovery that things are seldom what they seem...
...Other young people behave in kind...
...Earlier, she takes Reinhart to a discotheque called the Gastro-Intestinal System, featuring a rock group called the Chancres, along with such rooms as the Cecum, the Pancreas, and a restaurant called the Stomach...
...he had a contempt for money and those who earned it but demanded to be given as much as he needed...
...Sweet gives Reinhart a job at Cryon Industries, a nonprofit organization devoted to freezing the dying until cures can be developed for their ailments...
...Reinhart is neither intelligent nor sane nor sensible...
...It's all fried...
...Only when his fat adoring daughter is hit by a truck does he return to normal and decide that her need for him is greater than that of Cryon Industries...
...One of his listeners, though, turns out to be a former schoolmate, Bob Sweet, transformed from class weakling into the epitome of the self-made man...
...The author's ear for language is unreliable as well, although he seems better with the adult characters: the colorful violence of Maw Reinhart's lower middle-class speech, the paranoid rhetoric of the Rightist lawyer, or the pseudointel-lectual misusage of Reinhart's semi-educated wife...
...The call girl whom Reinhart patronizes (a parody of Gloria Wandrous in John O'Hara's But-terfield 8) whines about the spread of pornography, the corruption of morals, and the necessity of sending her daughter to Girl Scout camp to protect her from child molesters at the public pools...
...So labored a sentence is neither funny nor profound...
...For Reinhart, as for the Gnostics, the world is in the hands of the demons, while the decent suffer...
...Vital Parts is a satire on modern American life—the youth scene, Negro militancy, sexual liberation, big business, scientific breakthrough—and already the critics are acclaiming it the Great American Novel...
...Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell Thomas Berger has just brought out this third volume of his Rein-hart trilogy (the earlier ones were Crazy in Berlin and Reinhart in Love...
...Blaine] was a pacifist when asked to go to war, an advocate of violent demonstration for Negroes and college students, a believer in free love for anyone under thirty and repression for those older...
...a mod suit, a longhaired wig to cover his crewcut, and hires a prostitute at $200 a night...
...he buys a fast sports car...
...But the world he creates does not really say anything about American life or man...
...Streckfuss, whom Reinhart wrongly suspects of being a former Nazi...
...R. V. Cassill, in the New York Times Book Review, seems to be implying a comparison with Melville's Moby-Dick, or at least its whale, when he asserts that the trilogy "is so imposing and looms so enticingly amid the deep waters of the recent past that there is really no choice for the serious reader except to go after it with Ahab's passion...
...Nevertheless, when he realizes that his partners are frauds, he still feels sorry for them...
...A sexual deviate who wants Reinhart to have a pillow fight with him announces: "I admit to being immature, but what can you expect in this sort of world...
...Finally, the book is insufficiently focused, repetitive and overambitious...
...Do you dig soul food...
...the bouncers, all karate experts, confiscate drugs from the pushers in the men's room, then use the stuff themselves...
...Sweet, for instance, is indeed "self-made," a man who puts himself together every morning—toupee, false teeth and corsets—a swindler who lives on credit, borrowing money on a warehouse full of "cocoa beans" that turn out to be sacks of gravel...
...He differs from those around him simply in his desire to do the right thing, and this is the cause of his failure...
...In describing a feminist organization, Reinhart thinks: "That near-Lesbians had been attracted to its banner, along with a host of women extremely unattractive in either person or manner, was to be expected, but the defection of one of its spinster officers into a particularly authoritarian marriage, in which her husband often manacled her to the bedpost and, in spurred boots and a black cape, whipped her raw, was ruinous...
...Since good satires are as rare as great novels, these reviews are making extravagant claims for Berger's talent, and it would be an unusual book that could live up to them...
...More than anything, Reinhart is hurt by his feelings of compassion for others...
...A funny writer only for brief stretches, Berger is actually a modem Booth Tarkington, affirming the nice guy over the heel in a surprisingly old-fashioned novel...
...If the young are all repulsively childish and dictatorial, the old are no better...
...Vital Parts, alas, is not vital enough...
...His partner in Cryon Industries is a Swiss scientist, Dr...
...Unfortunately, Vital Parts is a very usual book...
...Who wants to grow up...
...I'm beginning to turn off the ethnic bag...
...he dressed and comported himself flagrantly, so as to attract attention, yet getting it he derided and or denounced his audience...
...I shall continue to look at life like a child, never losing my sense of wonder...
Vol. 53 • May 1970 • No. 10
