User:Elkoref/Vital Parts

Vital Parts is a 1970 novel by American author Thomas Berger. It is the third book in Berger's Reinhart series, which follows the life changes and odd adventures of its protagonist, Carlo Reinhart. Crazy in Berlin and Reinhart in Love were the first two in this series, followed by Vital Parts and Reinhart's Women. One reviewer asserted that "Vital Parts confirms Berger's rank as a major American novelist, one whose stylistic fecundity, psychological insight, and social knowledge are seemingly inexhaustible."

Plot
Carlo Reinhart is a 44-year old "loser" in life, finding himself struggling through his middle age with no prospects, and a wife and son who despise him. Kicked out of his home, he takes up with Bob Sweet, an old school acquaintance in the process of offering for public consumption the seemingly world-changing process of cryonics - the freezing of the human body for eventual restoration and cure. Initially approaching the project as an investment opportunity, Reinhart cannot seem to break out of his long downward spiral. He flirts with the idea of suicide, and eventually makes a deal to volunteer as the project's needed first human subject. While this decision seems to give him an exhilarating sense of freedom for a time, he ultimately realizes his need to care for his vulnerable teen-aged daughter, and so chooses to remain with the living of his own time.

Characters

 * Carlo Reinhart - a middle-aged, overweight man, well-meaning and thoughtful but a persistent victim of misunderstanding and malice
 * Bob Sweet - a school acquaintance and entrepreneur
 * Genevieve ("Gen") - Reinhart's embittered wife
 * Blaine - the Reinharts' twenty-one-year-old son, caught up in the cynicism and rebellion of his generation
 * Winona - their teen-aged daughter, the only family member who shows genuine affection for Reinhart
 * Gloria - a prostitute, for whom Reinhart is a 'regular'
 * Eunice - Sweet's young secretary
 * Streckfuss - a central European physician responsible for the science enabling 'cryonics'
 * "Maw" - Reinhart's widowed mother, now in a nursing home
 * Splendor Mainwaring - Reinhart's African-American friend, dying of cancer, a potential candidate for the first human cryonics subject

Major themes

 * Generational conflict, confusion; 1960s counterculture
 * "Received ideas," reality vs. representation

"What [Reinhart] seeks, really, is freedom from his own concept of freedom, freedom from the old American myth of omnipotent individuality so that he can join the revel of corporate corruption with the rest of us." Schickel, from Madden, 1995, p. 4