Neighbors

Neighbors is a 1980 novel by Thomas Berger.

Synopsis

Earl Keese is a middle-aged, middle-class suburbanite with a wife, Enid, and teenage daughter, Elaine. Earl is content with his dull, unexceptional life, but this changes when a younger, less sophisticated couple, Harry and Ramona, move in next door. Harry is physically intimidating and vulgar; Ramona is sexually aggressive, and both impose themselves on the Keese household. Their free-spirited personalities and overbearing and boorish behaviour endears them to Edith and Elaine, but Earl fears that he is losing control of his life and his family. Over the course of one night, the antagonism between Earl and his new neighbours escalates into suburban warfare.

On this book

Neighbors is not an easy book to categorise. Frequently absurd, it is also wildly unpredictable. It is perhaps best described as a comic nightmare; a satire of manners and suburbia, and a comment on emotional alienation with echoes of the works of Franz Kafka in both Earl Keese’s character and situation (which begins realistically but becomes increasingly fantastic). Earl Keese is an Everyman whose stolid life is swiftly turned upside down and as he scrambles to reclaim his sense of normalcy and dignity, he comes to think that everyone, including his family, is against him. As the story unravels, Berger maintains an off-kilter tone so that the reader is kept unaware of the line between paranoia and reality, defense and offense, action and intention, ally and adversary. Harry and Ramona seem to constantly undergo changes in their respective personalities and Enid and Elaine appear to choose sides against Earl at random, but Berger also implies that it is Earl’s sense of reality that is skewed and deluded (for example, Earl's idealised memories of his daughter's childhood don't gel with her recollections). Neighbors is a comedy of discomfort: Earl is frustrated because he can never prove that Harry and Ramona are doing anything wrong on purpose, and the more he attempts to expose them, the more ridiculous he makes himself look in the eyes of his family. Yet Earl comes to realize that Harry and Ramona (perhaps unintentionally, perhaps not) have served as the crucible of his redemption: being forced out of his comfort zone of complacency and habit has provided him with an excitement he has never known before. As Earl comes to recognise value in his neighbours, he realizes that his wife is a distrustful alcoholic, his daughter is a scholastic underachiever and petty thief, and that his new neighbours can provide him with an escape from his existence of insignificance and emotional impotence. From a nightmare comes hope and a strengthened resolve to survive: in this respect, Neighbors anticipates Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, whose protagonist, Sherman McCoy, undergoes a similar epiphany. In his study of Berger, writer Stanley Trachtenberg describes Neighbors as an Existentialist parable in which "the loss of coherence between various aspects of self comically fragments the notion of identity and thus fictionalizes the existential concept of authenticity as a shaping condition of it." In a 1980 newspaper interview, Berger said of Neighbors, "As my 10th novel, begun at the close of my 20th year as a published novelist, it is appropriately a bizarre celebration of whatever gift I have, the strangest of all my narratives...the morality of this work, like that of all my other volumes, will be in doubt until the end of the narrative – and perhaps to the end of eternity, now that I think about it."

The film

In 1981, [a film version] of Neighbors was released through Columbia Pictures, directed by John G. Avildsen and starring John Belushi as Earl, Dan Aykroyd as Vic (renamed from the novel's Harry), Cathy Moriarty as Ramona, and Kathryn Walker as Enid. The film inevitably takes many liberties with the story of the book, and it features a more upbeat ending.

The screenplay of the film is officially credited to Larry Gelbart, although it was extensively rewritten, to Gelbart's public disapproval. The film's production was troubled: Belushi and Aykroyd switched their roles in pre-production, acting against type (usual-wild man Belushi played the meek Earl and usual-straight-arrow Aykroyd played the obnoxious Vic). Belushi and Aykroyd also argued constantly with director Avildsen (believing he had no understanding of comedy) and lobbied to have him removed (Belushi wanted either Aykroyd himself or John Landis to direct), and Avildsen argued with producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown.

In addition to all this, Aykroyd and Belushi rewrote the screenplay, Belushi's drug problems caused trouble on set, there were problems with the film's score (Tom "Triple Scale" Scott was replaced by Bill Conti, and Belushi unsuccessfully tried to have the film finish with a song written and performed by the punk rock group Fear), and disastrous test-screenings led to multiple edits of the finished film being assembled in a succession of fervent attempts to make the film make more sense and be more audience-friendly. The movie studio eventually forced Fear off the project and to make up for it Belushi got them the spot on SNL.

For one test-version of the film, the head of Columbia Pictures, Frank Price, made the contentious decision to have quotations from positive press reviews of Berger's book assembled into a caption that would serve as a prologue to the film (this move prompted an angry missive from Dan Aykroyd). Although the final version of Neighbors released to cinemas in December 1981 was not exactly a commercial flop, it received harsh critical reaction and fans of Belushi and Aykroyd, perhaps expecting a comedy closer to The Blues Brothers, were disappointed in it. Neighbors was also John Belushi's last film - he died in March 1982, several months after the film's release.

A comprehensive look at the film's troubled production can be found in Bob Woodward's 1984 book, Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi.

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