Sneaky People by Thomas Berger (review)

258 Western American Literature the people or for the people. It is for sophisticated city dwellers much like the poet himself.” The pastoral elements Randall traces include the “ironic contrast between two worlds,” the poet’s “dissociated sensibility” which arises “because modem city life has gotten out of tune with the cycles of nature,” and the pastoral writer’s concern with the “real problems” of life — “death, love, time, etc.” Randall finds in Gather a feeling “that the olden times were best, and that the good days are gone forever.” He argues, however, that when Cather was an escapist in her prairie novels, that situation “usually arose through deviation from the classical pastoral norm as in the ending of My Antonia which drowns in a wave of nostalgia which is very beautiful but nostalgia nonetheless.” Bloom and Giannone both include in their discussions Cather’s com­ ment on artistic creativity: “Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplic­ able presence of the thing not named . . .”. Bloom goes on to show how the view is reflected in the principles and rules of Cather’s fiction, while Giannone shows how the view led Cather to emphasize sound. “The eye is the scientist’s way; it quantifies the object. The ear is the poet’s way; it synthesizes,” Giannone writes. “Alexandra’s auditory, intuitive response to the land [in O Pioneers/] reaches into a life-rhythm that corresponds to the continuous flow of time.” HENRY HAHN, Modesto, California Sneaky People. By Thomas Berger. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975. 315 pages. $8.95.) This entertaining novel will reaffirm Berger’s considerable skill as a writer of fiction, but it will do nothing to solidify his somewhat shaky place among writers of the American West. The unnamed and vaguely midwestern city in which the action of Sneaky People takes place could be on either side of the Mississippi; in fact, the author avoids any hint as to a specific locality. He does, however, set his story in a specific time— 1939. But if Sneaky People is a thirties novel, it is not an historical novel in the sense that Little Big Man is. There is no mention whatever of any current or recent event of national significance, and the few names of real persons are brought in only through the most casual allusions. The world of Buddy Sandifer, his family, and his associates is defined by their own horizons, as limited as any in literature. Buddy reads the local newspaper only to see what used cars his competitors are advertising; his non-working hours revolve entirely around his sex life, currently an affair with an ex-prostitute named Laveme. His fifteen-year-old son, Ralph, just awakening to sex, ends up Reviews 259 in the bed of this same Laverne, while the neglected wife, Naomi, finds her outlet in secretly writing pornography for an underground publisher. The “sneaky people” of the title — and all the characters can be included under this label — are sneaky in ways that both appall and amuse. The final chapter, for example, brilliantly combines black comedy with poetic justice. While Buddy desperately tries to reverse at the last minute a plan to have his wife murdered, the hired killer is on his way to California with Buddy’s money and the best car on his lot, and the young son is in bed with the mistress for whose affections the murder was planned., Berger’s book might be favorably compared with work of other con­ temporary purveyors of the absurd, but he has not written it as a contempor­ ary novel; it is not a retrospective view of the thirties from the seventies, but rather a novel of the thirties, one that might have been written in 1939. Its most interesting and distinctive element may be this ability of the author to transplant himself into the world of his characters and thus achieve a genuine thirties tone. There is no hint of then and now contrasts or of changes to come in American society. The novel is anchored in 1939; entirely typical of that year are the...