Originally published over 20 years ago and later made into a successful film, NEIGHBORS is a comic novel that defies easy categorization. Throughout his prolific career, Thomas Berger has warped his readers' perceptions of what is normal, thus creating a unique genre of paranoid fiction, replete with quotidian heroes and random strangers walking a tight rope above calamity. This book is no exception, as Berger plays ring leader to a cast of characters whose behavior blurs the distinctions between paranoia and reality, intention and action, friend and foe.

Over the course of a single, sleepless night, Earl Keese, a suburban Everyman, engages in self-defense or guerilla warfare (depending on where your sympathies lie at any given time) with his new neighbors (Harry and Ramona) who seem to threaten the very fabric of his carefully constructed reality. One cannot help but sense that Keese, like many of Franz Kafka's characters, is suddenly caught in a world whose banality has become palpable, even violent. Ramona and Harry are a brusque and conventionally mannerless pair whose presence exposes Keese's closely guarded vulnerabilities while galvanizing the latent sexual tension in his house. Indeed, sex is an implied or foreshadowed weapon brandished by each of the characters --- except Earl. Ramona, whose breasts connote "more of rocketry than mammalia," is a seductress who alternatively exhilarates and unnerves Keese: "How far would you go to avoid humiliation? That's what I always think when I look at somebody like you."

Throughout NEIGHBORS, Ramona teasingly deploys her weapons to test Keese's limits. Harry, a blonde giant, menaces Keese with surgical precision, becaus e his offenses, unlike Ramona's, are not tempered by sexuality --- but amplified by it. He makes advances to both of the women in Keese's life, his wife Enid and his college age daughter Elaine. While this bothers Keese, it is their sympathy for Harry that provokes tantrums of disbelief. Not only are they oblivious to Harry's abrasiveness, but they endow him with guru-like qualities while persistently chastising Keese's behavior. In Keese's eyes, Harry is boorish, vulgar and just not very neighborly. Yet, every once in a while, Harry manages to offset his threatening behavior with seemingly unprovoked acts of compassion that strike at Keese, who is deeply touched by any extension of friendship, whether it is false or not. "You're an unusual fellow, Harry. Every time I see you as a criminal, by another light you look like a kind of benefactor." Distinguishing victims from their assailants is fundamental to interpreting this bewildering and extremely funny novel.

Once Harry and Ramona invade Keese's cul de sac, preservation --- of personal space, of personal dignity, and of life --- reclaims its instinctual, even feral, relevance. Keese finds himself in a situation where "he was somehow antagonizing the entire world merely by trying to defend himself." Like an offended god on Olympus, Berger relentlessly thrusts his characters into increasingly tortuous situations where "chance encounters can be brutal," and almost always are. Early in the novel Keese has already had his limits severely tested. Ramona has made unsettling advances toward him, while Harry has swindled him out of 32 dollars and is getting on a little too well with Enid. To add to the chaos, Earl has inadvertently sent Harry's car into a nearby creek and has yet to tell anyone. We soon discover, after a semi-successful attempt at extortion, that Ramona knows Earl's little secret and is waiting for the perfect opportunity to humiliate Keese: "Isn't it time, Earl, for a little confessing of your own?"

We expect Ramona to make Keese squirm and to admit that he accidentally wrecked Harry's car. Keese complies ably with the squirming part and just when he is about to give his full confession Ramona throws a curve ball, "He tried to rape me." How is a reader supposed to react to this? The willing suspension of disbelief, an essential part of our contract with the author, is put through acrobatic paces because the brutality exceeds all expectation. This scene is just the beginning of a burlesque nightmare that includes numerous acts of physical violence, a gunshot, and a house burning to the ground. With each barrage of inferences and accusations we are left to wonder --- can this really be happening? How much more absurdity will the characters reasonably endure? How much more can we take? Reading is believing. Fortunately, Berger's dexterous narrative constantly teases and subverts our expectations, while never forgetting to make us laugh (a little uneasily perhaps) at the same time. Underneath the paranoid slapstick of NEIGHBORS lies a tightly constructed and rigidly complex narrative that engages the reader on many levels.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Earl Keese's life has been measured out with coffee spoons. Once Harry and Ramona disrupt his prosaic existence, Keese too observes that his relationships with the external world have been forged by convenience and endured by habit. He soon begins to see Enid as a cloistered alcoholic, while his blind adoration for his daughter fades quickly into impatience as she is exposed as a petty thief. Indeed, there are a few pages late in the novel where you just might think that you can finally see where Berger has been leading you. Don't be so easily fooled. The blurred distinctions linger until the very last page, leaving many questions unanswered. The most intriguing of which is to what degree we can rely on our senses. "Keese admitted to himself that, very rarely, some outlandish vision of his might be to some degree or even wholly authentic; but since he had no standard of measurement he must, in self-preservation, consistently reject the evidence of his eyes. In this basic way he was at odds with the rest of humanity as to one of its incontestable truths: seeing is believing." Yet in this dead end neighborhood, appearances, or the discernible lack thereof, account for everything. What really happens, who is to blame, and who is the victim? With Earl Keese acting as our window on the cul de sac it is difficult to know. In this way Berger's work demands closer scrutiny. There is no standard of measurement.