Best Friends

by Thomas Berger

Book Overview

How do we choose our best friends? Berger explores our motivations in choosing our companions--and the consequences of keeping or quitting them. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743255844
• ISBN13: 9780743255844
• Release Date: May 2004
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 209 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.9" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

What a strange little book!

Why do I keep reading works by this author? They are always so strange and sometimes unsettling, BUT the character development is always good and the characters are unusual. Here, Roy and Sam are lifelong friends. Or so they think, until Sam wants to borrow more money and Roy falls in love with Sam's wife, and all of their tidy, predictable lives fall apart. I enjoyed it.

Bittersweet fruits of friendship...

A master of dissecting the human psyche, Berger posits a twenty-year friendship, begun in adolescence, and fillets it for his reader's edification. Probing beneath the surface of the niceties that go into the long-established patterns of a relationship, Best Friends is particularly interesting as it concerns two successful young men, Roy Courtwright, a bachelor, and Sam Grandy, married for three years.Roy has studiously avoided any interference with the couple, respecting their marital integrity while protecting his own turf as best friend to Sam. Roy is a friend who knows his place, treats his lovers kadmirably and barely knows Sam's wife, Kristin on a personal level. Much like a long-term marriage, the friendship is predictable and never hurtful to either man. But when the overweight and over-indulgent Sam has a heart attack, everyone is caught off balance.In the midst of unexpected personal trouble, Roy turns to Kristin as a substitute, unwilling to burden Sam or jeopardize his health. Roy suffers some trepidation about sharing his problems with Kristin, but is too distraught to keep his own counsel. During their conversation, Kristin inadvertently mentions some remarks Sam has made about his friend, words that sound like betrayal to Roy. In doing so, Kristin illuminates an unsuspected problem in the men's relationship. Reacting to the thinly veiled animosity in Sam's words, Roy questions the basis of their friendship, for loyalty and integrity are paramount to Roy's wellbeing, while Sam is ambivalent about such values. Roy is shocked to realize that he has harbored some resentment toward Sam, "Maybe he and I are friends just out of habit, though maybe the same can be said of everything else. Living may be just a habit."The real beauty of Berger's intelligent and thought provoking novel is the simplicity of his protagonists, the commonality of experience, so remarkably familiar that the reader is privy to the thoughts and small disharmonies of these characters. As personal as a private conversation, Best Friends exposes the important relationships we take for granted. Luan Gaines/2003.

The Unexamined Friend is Not Worth Having

Exotic car dealer Roy Courtright, a bachelor with superficial tastes in women, has been best friends with Sam Grandy, a large-boned, passive-aggressive sort, for over twenty years. Sam has over the years asked Roy for loans of huge sums of money to compensate for his capricious consumer habits and Roy, the benificiary of a large inheritance, has happily obliged. But as the novel unfolds, we see that Roy begins to examine his friendship with more vigor. Sam Grandy is after all emotionally undeveloped (seems like a twelve-year-old) and seems more in love with his gadgets than he is with his wife, Kristin. Roy and Sam's wife Kristin bond when they both must nurse Sam, the sufferer of a heart-attack. Through this bonding, they see themselves, and the feelings they have for each other, with more clarity and also see, with equal clearness, the noxiousness of Sam. With these new revelations, they must test where their loyalties lay. The conflict is handled well as the novel, well paced, reaches a steady climax.I've read much Berger over the years and argue that this must be one of his best novels in part because it relies on less slapstick than previous efforts and instead relies on complex characters and highly ambiguous situations so that the reader is constantly amazed by the novel's twists and turns.

With Best Friends Like This . . .

It is wonderful to write that in his 22nd novel Thomas Berger maintains the high standard that readers have come to expect from him. Best Friends is one of his miniatures (unlike Arthur Rex or the Little Big Man books) in which he focuses on a few characters over a short span of time.In this novel Berger examines the meaning of the term "best friend." Sam, fat and whiny, has been best friends with Roy, fit and aloof, since their childhood days. Over the course of a few days Roy comes to examine not only the nature of his friendship with Sam, but also the way he leads his life.Berger's prose, always cool, achieves here a new level of refinement and precision. By the end of the book you know Roy and his world intimately without being overwhelmed with verbiosity. While Roy experiences a spectrum of events and emotions that could fill a lifetime, the reader never feels that any of what happens is implausible, such is the deftness of Berger's touch.Hopefully, this work will bring critical attention back to Berger who has been for too long ignored. His clear-eyed view of people and their ways (as well as his incredible prose style) is ripe for rediscovery.Only caveat: there is a huge editing error at the end of the novel. Someone should have caught the inconsistency.