Sneaky People by Thomas Berger
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
What a disappointment. I can’t say I hated it, but I certainly wouldn’t have finished it had it not been chosen for a mystery book group I intended to join. It’s so crude as to qualify as soft-core porn. I realize it’s intended as satire but it just plain fails at that. I haven’t been to this discussion group before but I’ll be very interested to see how this book got chosen. If future books are like this one, I won’t be staying. I don’t think of myself as easily offended, but this book managed to offend me pretty much all the way through.
The book is set in the 1930s somewhere in Bigotsville, USA. Racist terms abound along with the F-bombs and graphic descriptions of the crudest teenage boy sex fantasies. The characters are all cartoons and repulsive ones at that, except for a few pitiable ones. There were a couple of amusing scenes near the end, but that’s as close to a plot as I was able to find. There is no mystery, no murder, no action scene, no detective, and no ending to speak of. I turned the last page expecting to find that the last few pages must have been ripped out since the story just came to an abrupt halt. I suppose Berger just ran out of metaphors and slang terms for erections and gave up.