The Houseguest: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

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, one 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.

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.