ROBERT CREWS

Berger continues his postmodern traversal of the Harvard Classics (Orrie's Story, 1990) with a blow-by-blow American remake of Robinson Crusoe. Like Defoe's hero, Robert Crews has never amounted to anything- -having squandered his inheritance in an alcoholic haze while never working a day, pausing only long enough for three marriages—until he gets his chance at redemption when a plane carrying him and three companions (two virtual strangers and Dick Spurgeon, one of his oldest friends, whom he doesn't like any better) on a fishing expedition goes down in a storm that leaves him the sole survivor. Crews's initial adventures—salvaging meager survival gear from the wreck, making fire to scare away an inquisitive bear, fashioning primitive shelter and transport—are entertaining but pointless, apart from the self-evident moral that ``destroying oneself had a point only under conditions of civilization.'' Crews's wry flashbacks to his women and his hollow friendship with Spurgeon aren't propped up by a worldview as interesting as Defoe's providential imperialism (echoed without resonance in Crews's insistence that ``I've got a charmed life''), and peerless ironist Berger seems to deny irony to himself as well as his hero. The story picks up when Crews meets his Friday—a woman on the run from the man who shot her—but it's not until the final chapter showing his edgy, abrupt re-acculturation that Berger comes to fuller terms with what Crews's adventures have made of him. A shaggy-man story with an ambiguous denouement that, in retrospect, turns the rest of the tale into one long set-up line.