The feud

By Thomas Berger

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Description: The saga of Carlo Reinhart, the quintessential American antihero, is a major accomplishment of modern literature and a history of our times. The sequence of novels begins with Crazy in Berlin and continues through Reinhart in Love, Vital Paris, and Reinhart's Women. Volume by volume, and as a series, it has received high praise. The place is small-town America and the time is the second half of the 1930's, when school boys found girls at summertime dances in the park, and many folks routinely kept a gun in the house for sporting purposes and/or self-defense. The Beekers, who live in Hornbeck have a series of encounters, ranging from the hostile to the amorous, with members of the Bullard family, who owns a hardware store in the adjoining hamlet of Millville. Prominent Bullards include Cousin Beaverton Kirby, who is reputed to be a redhead dick and packs a pistol to prove it, the childish, provocative Eva, a prematurely voluptuous teenager, and her feckless brother, called Junior, to whom trouble comes as naturally as ticks in a hound dog. The Beeker family consists of Tony, a nearsighted but hair-triggered athlete: his sluttish sister Bernice, who has been intimate with most of Hornbeck's male population, including the chief of police: their brother Jack, a reader of adventure tales, Peeping Tom, and moviegoer, their stout benevolent mother, and a father who carries his pride on his sleeve. While the Beekers and the Bullards are confronting or dodging one another, the standard village personages of the day-prating preachers, cops nice or nasty, lustful firemen, and even bank robbers-are going about their business.