The Shamus as Schlemiel
GOODMAN, WALTER
The Shamus as Schlemiel Who Is Teddy Villanova? By Thomas Berger Delacorte. 247 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Walter Goodman Who is Teddy Villanova?. The question that confounds and torments Russell...
...Why is the impeccable Don Washburn's fly open...
...Thus our man offers a show of resistance to the shocks of urban life in a benighted time...
...Or is he named for the celebrated 17th-18th century English architect who built so many churches, including St...
...If dead, why does he keep reappearing...
...And, in case I haven't yet gotten the news across, it is very funny...
...Or: 'Having fed me a sequence of meals from her own kitchen, the young lady could with some justice expect me eventually to pick up a check...
...I'm audience enough.' "He was a psychologist of keen penetration, and I told him as much...
...That's the sort of thing that rouses Wren's combative spirits...
...The temptation to quote from Teddy Villanova is irresistible...
...asks Wren, seeking clarification on a small point...
...A conversation between Wren and one of the detectives who keep popping up (is he really a detective...
...Where accidents are the rule, where each event is problematic, existence becomes precarious...
...Kicked in the crotch by a woman he thought to be a friend, he manages, in a strained voice, to rebuke her: "You . . . treacherous baggage...
...How did the bullet get into the brownie...
...One of Wren's problems is that he is more at home with the magic of words than with events...
...We are shown large dogs taking over the streets...
...Is Peggy Tumulty, Wren's loyal secretary, loyal...
...surly doormen whose main occupation is the avoidance of trouble...
...Is Mr...
...Without the incorruptible integrity of the protagonist, the center of any detective story, even a spoof, could not hold...
...What it is has in common with that otherwise quite different book is that it takes its inspiration from human quirkiness, bafflement at the world and irrepressible strivings...
...Therefore, why don't you die?' " 'Because it's the same!' He had topped me again and, furthermore, plagiaristically, one of the pre-So-cratics having said that a good 2500 years before, which I should have remembered...
...He is less capable of self-defense than the small singing bird whose name he bears...
...I had never heard that word in speech, and never read it but in the text of T. S. Eliot...
...Haha!' "'Hoho!' said he...
...But praise is as useless to me as punishment!' he replied with asperity...
...Toy with her fine foot if you like, but eschew her quivering thigh and the demesnes that there adjacent lie...
...Is Ganymede Press a publisher of pornography or something a lot more mundane...
...It is carried off with zest and a special sort of style that kids itself with exemplary earnestness...
...Mysteries abound...
...The wino who out-philosophizes the philosopher-detective is but one of the generally threatening features of New York that Berger limns, with a relish for the city's madness and decay...
...More important, is she a virgin...
...Is Berger, then, paying them deference or merely making mock of them...
...He is a determined self-improver, a conscientious reader, a master of quotations in several languages (his bookshelves contain only edifying works), and he is under the illusion that he can judge people by what they tell him...
...elaborate looks that keep nobody out...
...But there the resemblance ends...
...Excuse me for what might appear an impertinence,' I said to Washburn...
...All the ills of the world can be traced to the foolish desire to look well in the eyes of others.' "'Very clever, but circumspice: there are no others present at this moment...
...Are there any villains...
...The question that confounds and torments Russell Wren, the unlicensed private investigator who narrates Thomas Berger's latest novel, is not likely to keep many readers tossing at night...
...In fairness, even a shrewder sleuth than Wren would be thrown by the conundrums surrounding the search for Teddy Villanova...
...Involved in a conversation, you might have your pookets picked—or, in certain areas be quickly, deftly sodomized while making an apology for dialing a wrong number...
...When Wren sets himself to making deductions from the peculiar events that keep happening all around him, the reader can be certain of only two things: First, he will be entirely rational...
...Rather vulgarly, I had used that very term, to which she replied: 'You've already done that!' " 'Huh?' " 'Picked up a Czech!' Her name was Natalie Novotny...
...There's me...
...Who put the beluga caviar in the refrigerator...
...You have, in other words, opted out of the social contract,' said 1. " 'Shamelessness is the answer,' said this contemporary Diogenes...
...irritable cabbies who can't find their way...
...And death is the same as life...
...Similarly, when the secret agent or public pervert Boris, while crying "Daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn falcon" to a helicopter, allows his hand to approach the upper thigh of Peggy Tumulty, Wren seizes his wrist: "This wench is a ward," he announces...
...The rational mind can find no purchase in a civilization gone out of control...
...Natalie Novotny is definitely no virgin, but what, exactly, is her sexual persuasion...
...To begin with, the characters keep changing roles...
...When Wren gets really upset, he reaches back for appropriate language to the era of his architectural namesake, who, remember, attempted to bring truth and order to the chaos of London...
...Are the villains drug peddlers or art thieves or counterfeiters or white slavers...
...He is a victim of forces that do not submit to reason...
...To combine them is superfetation...
...Private eyes are tough guys who know how to deliver a kidney punch...
...In either case, he has produced a work that is in many ways superior to its models...
...The derivation of names is of no small moment in a novel where the policemen are called Hus, Zwingli, Knox, and Calvin...
...Wherever he goes, he finds intellectual challenges—even when encoutering a "purplejfaced wino" who threatens, "in a stentorian voice," to abuse the private eye if he doesn't buy him a bottle...
...The detective replies: "No, Jake the Wop or Big Jake...
...Although Russell Wren, our battered eye, receives as many beatings per chapter as any detective hero in the literature, he wouldn't hurt a fly...
...Or are they policemen...
...Actually, the whole book is a game of words...
...Paranoid fantasies, perhaps, but New York is a bad place in which to offer the unguarded spine...
...Which is as it must be: Berger's tribute to Hammelt, Chandler and Macdonald is mainly a series of gags at the expense of those worthies, their intricate tales peopled by bizarre characters, and the whole concocted spirit of their enterprise...
...Whereupon Wren, typically, remarks to us: "I made a mental memorandum on his tendency, only now revealed, to be redundant: it might be his usable weakness...
...it is a series of skits that display, with great humor, Berger's special joy in juggling the language...
...Russell Wren does have one thing in common with Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer?he is honest...
...Damn him," thinks Wren...
...a pox on you...
...To rate a writer's works tends to be a fatuous enterprise, so I shall refrain from hazarding an opinion as to whether this novel is better than Berger's notable Little Big Man...
...If alive, why is his bloodied body continually being hauled around and stowed in unusual places...
...Paul's...
...And when it comes to puns, Berger has no mercy...
...But does your wife happen to be Teutonic?' " 'Too tonic...
...he replied in what seemed genuine bewilderment...
...Bakewell, the fat man, dead or alive...
...Early in the proceedings, the unsubtle Bakewell declares: "Gonna say one thing once, and ain't gonna say it again, so get it straight the one time I say it, because you ain't gonna hear it any more...
...There is danger in every object, animate or inanimate: "I slunk to the corner, where one of the new public-phone arrangements stood: two instruments hanging on a panel exposed to the weather...
...and second, he will be entirely wrong...
...Fiction's private eyes are usually shrewd analysts of humankind, experienced in the workings of life...
...the very names in the lobby directory of Wren's dilapidated building keep reshaping themselves...
...For in this takeoff on the private-eye novel, the arbitrary complexities of plot defy sustained attention...
...becomes a contest in erudition: "And what about Big Jake the Wop...
Vol. 60 • May 1977 • No. 11
