Dec 23, 2009

Reinhart's Women | Characters/Techniques

Berger employs a very restrained style and narrative mode for Reinhart's Women, as though making a deliberate effort to avoid the more imaginative gambles of Arthur Rex (1978) and Neighbors (1980). The novel returns to the more realistic comedy of manners tradition that influenced Berger's first Reinhart novels, although there are moments that seem to be pure farce, in the mode of Neighbors and The Feud (1983), the book that immediately followed Reinhart's Women.

Berger's style is an urbane and mature instrument in Reinhart's...