Cozy and reliable as the friendship seems to be, there are fissures in it, and two successive events set the course of implosion: Sam has a heart attack and winds up in the hospital, and Francine gets killed by her husband in a murder-suicide. With no one to turn to, Roy finds himself seeking solace from Kristin, who actually begins to like him; Roy as a person is different from "Sam's idea of you, which is really different," she hints darkly, "maybe more different than you expect." When Sam claims bankruptcy and begs for a massive loan, Roy's loyalties are torn between his feckless pal and his pal's sensible wife — forcing him to question just how his friendship with Sam started and what sustains it from either side. Are these two men who swear there's no competition between them actually in a lifelong battle to get on each other's nerves — to eventually finish the other one off?

Berger is not normally the type of writer who brings to mind Goethe, but the relationships in Best Friends made me think constantly of Elective Affinities, that strange expository novel of Teutonic romanticism where people are compared to chemical agents that naturally attract or oppose, sometimes attracting in spite of opposition because of their mutual relationship with a third; a character in Goethe's novel cites the example of oil and water joined by alkaline salt. Roy and Kristin are at odds with each other at some level because they feel proprietary toward Sam, but he's also what they share, this financial and psychological burden who takes advantage of both in the same way and keeps either from getting what they want. Roy and Sam, similarly, each has something the other wants, and Kristin is their "common opponent."

"There are times when all choices must, as if by divine law, be disastrous," Roy thinks at one point, quickly consoling himself by saying those things only happen in works of the imagination. The joke, of course, is that Roy is a character in such a work, but the point is that in both art and life personal and natural disasters do have a shape, a history, and a malefic destiny. For Roy and Sam, no bond of loyalty is stronger than the bond of mutually assured destruction.

Berger's humor has become progressively wry in the last few years, and we feel for Roy even as Berger turns his illusions inside out. This slim and easy read is a deceptively "light" one that digs into the recesses of friendship with a remarkably subtle touch. It puts Berger back on familiar turf, nailing the passive-aggressiveness of modern life like no other writer alive.