Best Friends by Thomas Berger. Simon and Schuster. 209 pages. $24.00
"One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible." So wrote Henry Adams, that great sourpuss of American letters. This may be a little too optimistic for Thomas Berger, who has written about a great many things for over 40 years, and who has always had a special talent for darkly comic novels of suburban anomie. His classic in this regard is the 1980 Neighbors, where staid, middle-aged Earl Keese finds himself locked in a power struggle with the kinky couple who move in next door. Berger isn't cynical about the possibility of people getting along; he's both fatalist and moralist, sympathetic to the people caught in the catastrophes he so neatly arranges for them, but not particularly merciful about their fates. (Poor Earl. One still remembers his dying gasp.)
Outside of the fact that they're both 33-year-old trust fund babies and pals for 20 years, Roy Courtland and Sam Grandy have little in common on the surface. They're the typical odd couple, slob and snob. Roy is handsome and single, a health nut whose main obsessions are beautiful women and beautiful cars. Sam is obnoxious, grossly overweight, and a sucker for fancy gadgets he can't operate. He's also married to Kristin, who is way too pretty for him, and who doesn't much care for Roy – friends being somewhat more forgiving of excesses than wives are. Roy and Sam are honest with each other as only friends can be; Roy thinks even their occasional lies show how close they are, since "lying to one's best friend was the next best thing to lying to oneself."
While Roy piddles around selling "vintage high performance" cars that no one can afford, Sam doesn't work at all; his care and feeding is left up to Kristin, an up and coming manager at a local bank branch and a gourmet chef at home. Sam has also blown most of his inheritance on newfangled toys and bad investments, and continually hits up Roy for loans he has no intention of repaying. Roy and Kristin are Sam's co-dependents, and Roy in particular prides himself on being tolerant, good-natured, and loyal.
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