Vital Parts: A Novel

It's the late 1960s, and Carl Reinhart has grown fat and cynical. His son is angry and hates him, and his daughter is na?ve and helpless (if the book were written ten years later it would be just the opposite). His marriage is a failure, as are all his business schemes (his latest scheme involves cryonics). He continues to blunder through life, rationalizing every joker ever dealt to him. His biggest problem is being unable to believe in "certainty": "Carl is reluctant to accept the popular idea of reality with its narrow-minded emphasis on finality," one character observes. He has an affair with a young woman that really doesn't amount to anything. It's also Berger's comment on the social unrest taking place during the setting of the story, an unrest with which Berger is not totally sympathetic. He sees the anarchy that his son Blaine espouses, for example, as only another form of suppression. As in all his novels, Berger writes primarily with his ear, and he has down pat all the psycho-babble and 60s cultural slang and double-speak, which adds to the humor. It's a very dark humor, though, and sometimes depressing (anyone remembering the 60s first-hand will probably feel the same way). This was the third of the four Reinhart books, and is the most bitter (Berger himself once referred to it as a "diatribe") in outlook.

Carl Reinhart is a lovable, middle-aged loser whose hippy son hates him; his wife is leaving him for a younger man; and even his mother makes fun of his string of business failures, which leave him broke and homeless at 44. However, his simpleton daughter adores him almost as much as she loves food.When a former high school classmate gives the overweight, crew cut Reinhart a chance to get in on the ground floor of the cryogenics fad, i.e. freezing corpses for future restoration, the WWII veteran crashes head-on into the 60's generation.Berger's great talent for depicting life's absurdities through the eyes of a talented misfit, which he did so well in "Little Big Man," is used perfectly in "Vital Parts" to depict the plight of the middle-aged, suburban, white American male, whose post-WWII utopia was irrevocably altered by women's lib, free love, civil rights, and the youth movement.Between his oustal by his wife for cutting his son's long hair off while sleeping and his affair with a 22-year-old nymphomaniac, who keeps her car doors unlocked because she "doesn't like to block any of her entrances," Reinhart has one hilarious adventure after another. The plot hums and it is hard to read "Vital Parts" in public without laughing hysterically.If you liked "Confederacy of Dunces" or "Catch-22" with their wiseguy, lost-in-a-sea-of-madness protaganists then you will love "Vital Parts."It is a shame that so many of Berger's books are no longer in print. He's one of the great observers of late 20th century American life.