Best Friends : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Bittersweet fruits of friendship...
Review: A master of dissecting the human psyche, Berger posits a twenty-year friendship, begun in adolescence, and fillets it for his reader's edification. Probing beneath the surface of the niceties that go into the long-established patterns of a relationship, Best Friends is particularly interesting as it concerns two successful young men, Roy Courtwright, a bachelor, and Sam Grandy, married for three years.

Roy has studiously avoided any interference with the couple, respecting their marital integrity while protecting his own turf as best friend to Sam. Roy is a friend who knows his place, treats his lovers kadmirably and barely knows Sam's wife, Kristin on a personal level. Much like a long-term marriage, the friendship is predictable and never hurtful to either man. But when the overweight and over-indulgent Sam has a heart attack, everyone is caught off balance.

In the midst of unexpected personal trouble, Roy turns to Kristin as a substitute, unwilling to burden Sam or jeopardize his health. Roy suffers some trepidation about sharing his problems with Kristin, but is too distraught to keep his own counsel. During their conversation, Kristin inadvertently mentions some remarks Sam has made about his friend, words that sound like betrayal to Roy. In doing so, Kristin illuminates an unsuspected problem in the men's relationship. Reacting to the thinly veiled animosity in Sam's words, Roy questions the basis of their friendship, for loyalty and integrity are paramount to Roy's wellbeing, while Sam is ambivalent about such values. Roy is shocked to realize that he has harbored some resentment toward Sam, "Maybe he and I are friends just out of habit, though maybe the same can be said of everything else. Living may be just a habit."

The real beauty of Berger's intelligent and thought provoking novel is the simplicity of his protagonists, the commonality of experience, so remarkably familiar that the reader is privy to the thoughts and small disharmonies of these characters. As personal as a private conversation, Best Friends exposes the important relationships we take for granted. Luan Gaines/2003.

Rating:
Summary: The Unexamined Friend is Not Worth Having
Review: Exotic car dealer Roy Courtright, a bachelor with superficial tastes in women, has been best friends with Sam Grandy, a large-boned, passive-aggressive sort, for over twenty years. Sam has over the years asked Roy for loans of huge sums of money to compensate for his capricious consumer habits and Roy, the benificiary of a large inheritance, has happily obliged. But as the novel unfolds, we see that Roy begins to examine his friendship with more vigor. Sam Grandy is after all emotionally undeveloped (seems like a twelve-year-old) and seems more in love with his gadgets than he is with his wife, Kristin. Roy and Sam's wife Kristin bond when they both must nurse Sam, the sufferer of a heart-attack. Through this bonding, they see themselves, and the feelings they have for each other, with more clarity and also see, with equal clearness, the noxiousness of Sam. With these new revelations, they must test where their loyalties lay. The conflict is handled well as the novel, well paced, reaches a steady climax.

I've read much Berger over the years and argue that this must be one of his best novels in part because it relies on less slapstick than previous efforts and instead relies on complex characters and highly ambiguous situations so that the reader is constantly amazed by the novel's twists and turns.

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Summary: With Best Friends Like This . . .
Review: It is wonderful to write that in his 22nd novel Thomas Berger maintains the high standard that readers have come to expect from him. Best Friends is one of his miniatures (unlike Arthur Rex or the Little Big Man books) in which he focuses on a few characters over a short span of time.

In this novel Berger examines the meaning of the term "best friend." Sam, fat and whiny, has been best friends with Roy, fit and aloof, since their childhood days. Over the course of a few days Roy comes to examine not only the nature of his friendship with Sam, but also the way he leads his life.

Berger's prose, always cool, achieves here a new level of refinement and precision. By the end of the book you know Roy and his world intimately without being overwhelmed with verbiosity. While Roy experiences a spectrum of events and emotions that could fill a lifetime, the reader never feels that any of what happens is implausible, such is the deftness of Berger's touch.

Hopefully, this work will bring critical attention back to Berger who has been for too long ignored. His clear-eyed view of people and their ways (as well as his incredible prose style) is ripe for rediscovery.

Only caveat: there is a huge editing error at the end of the novel. Someone should have caught the inconsistency.

Rating:
Summary: Not worth the paper its printed on
Review: This book was an absolute waste of time. It read like a stale Daniel Steele novel... actually, I do Ms. Steele a disservice by saying that. The book was completely unoriginal. The characters were poorly developed and uninteresting, the lead character in particular. Save your money and time.

Rating:
Summary: Written like a police detective procedural.
Review: This is a wry tale of a married couple and the man's best friend. It is told from the friend's point of view. While it deals with emotions and relationships, the prose style reminds me of a police detective procedural. I enjoyed both the style and the book, but it is simply not an outstanding work of art. One major drawback is that the husband is such an unlikable and uninteresting "baby", as his own wife characterizes him. If the book can be said to have a point, it is that the weight of a relationship's history can instill a sense of obligation and closeness even after the affection has been lost.

Rating:
Summary: Written like a police detective procedural.
Review: This is a wry tale of a married couple and the man's best friend. It is told from the friend's point of view. While it deals with emotions and relationships, the prose style reminds me of a police detective procedural. I enjoyed both the style and the book, but it is simply not an outstanding work of art. One major drawback is that the husband is such an unlikable and uninteresting "baby", as his own wife characterizes him. If the book can be said to have a point, it is that the weight of a relationship's history can instill a sense of obligation and closeness even after the affection has been lost.

Rating:
Summary: Berger Tops Himself -- and Far More than Comic
Review: [To a friend:] I finished "Best Friends" yesterday. From my point of view, it's absolutely the best, most perfect thing I've ever read by Berger -- or at least that's what my memory's telling me. Note perfect, from beginning to end. And the end is right. I've none of the sense of a bit of dissatisfaction I think I've felt in the past with some of Berger's windings-up.

It's not a funny book at all. There are the occasional ironic comments on contemporary mores. There are the beginnings of a farcical situation near the beginning -- but the misunderstanding is quickly cleared up. The plot does have the usual elements of intervening chance and its ramifications -- but more that of Greek tragedy than farce.

It's a precise, quiet book, the calibration of human interactions, the nuances of character, the contextual hovering and impingement of judgments about right and wrong. One of the reader's jobs is to keep his distance from the protagonist's point of view, especially at one point late in the novel when his passion and that point of view completely overwhelm him -- and, potentially and all too easily, the reader's judgment. Berger, however, immaculately keeps his own cool.

I still don't know for sure what the cover art has to do with anything. Nothing directly in the book, certainly. Though I'll admit that it does FEEL right. I just went to the Amazon illustration. Assuming that Berger had something to do with the choice, my guess is that the cover is meant to be redolent of a sex farce, in which one person picks up a key for an untoward assignation in a room in an out-of-the-way country inn. Part of the spirit of the book but in no way revealing what actual happens.

In considering all of Berger's work, I'm beginning to think that we approach it much too much with, say, "The Feud" in mind as its exemplar -- because farcical comedy is such an easy pleasure. Taken as a whole, though, Berger is much more a rather serious social commentator --.and, of course, he's spread widely over so many genres.

In any case, I'm gasping at the power and perfection of "Best Friends". I'd like to wish it would get him and the rest of his work more recognition -- and get lots more of the books back into print so that they CAN be recognized! But I doubt that this book could ever do it. It's too much another "Something Happened" -- not what people are going to want to confront.

The reviews will be interesting. And it must be kept in mind that my positive evaluation of Berger's nuances and judgments IS my own. Another person could easily argue that Berger is wrong from top to bottom and that his values are misplaced.