Loopy Locutions

By Paul Gray

WHO IS TEDDY VIUANOVA?

by THOMAS BERGER 247 pages. Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence. $7.95.

A down-at-the-heels private eye named Russel Wren is suddenly victimized by a series of increasingly vigorous beatings. Someone, perhaps everyone, is out to get him, and Wren naturally wants to find out why. One good reason may be his mouth. A former college English teacher, the shamus speaks in Victorian grandiloquent, and the burden of his remarks is composed of snippets from the Great Books and library paste. Wren cannot even make a kinky pass at his secretary without providing footnotes: "Dante finds Beatrice in heaven, on one side of the Lord, with none other than the Virgin on his other hand. Think of that, a trinity in which two of the elements are female!"

Although it begins with all the standard props of detective fiction, Thomas Berger's eighth novel is a spoof of whodunits only in the sense that Portnoy's Complaint was a redaction of Oedipus Rex. Berger's chief debt is not to the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler but to the fiction of the '60s (including his own Little Big Man), written before black humor had been eclipsed by black studies. The convoluted and brazenly preposterous plot of Who Is Teddy Villanova? is simply Berger's excuse to practice verbal gunplay with a license to kill.

The art calls for baroque extravagance and Berger provides plenty. Esoteric words ("canescing," "superfetation," "glabrous") gambol freely with lowlife slang. Natalie Novotny, Wren's girl friend, refuses his offer to pay for dinner because he has already picked up the Czech. Objects and people are described in loopy, gargantuan locutions. A chandelier becomes a "hippodrome for silverfish"; an incidental character has "the dental terrain of a boar."

Such pyrotechnics fizzle as often as they go off, but Berger gets steady comic mileage out of built-in absurdities. Since the detective is clearly the butt of a massive finagle, nothing he meets is what it seems to be. An apparently moronic cop nabs Wren with an abrupt display of erudition: "Did you cause that man to shuffle off his mortal coil?" In the twinkling of a transition, innocent young schoolgirls become a team of orgiastic courtesans. Even when Wren finally tracks down the villain who has been tormenting him, his deduction #151;based on impeccable evidence--is wrong.

The novel's relentless japery is almost sufficient to drown out some bleak thoughts on the state of the urban world. Seen through Wren's eyes, New York City is a ruin in which civility and beauty are relentlessly stamped out. "I suspected that the entire block," he notes, "chosen because it was handsome, had been condemned for demolition and cleared of tenants." Noting that automated garages are replacing the older type, thus putting "churlish" attendants out of work, Wren comments: "One more bit of the inhumane is replaced by the non-human." The author strikes this mordant note often enough to suggest a bitterness behind the punch lines. Berger rarely fails to make wretched excess seem hilarious, but he insists that equal emphasis be placed on both excess and wretched. Paul Gray

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