Thomas Berger’s The Feud is a comic novel about small-town American grievances.

We know the ones, where the dispute that begins with something stupid, hardens into family mythology, and then keeps recruiting more people until nobody can quite remember whether they are defending honour, property, masculinity, boredom, or just the right to be unpleasant in public. Berger takes the logic of the blood feud and drags it into modern civic life, where the weapons are manners, resentment, gossip, class irritation, and the endlessly renewable stupidity of being human.

The pleasure here is Berger’s deadpan social comedy. He has a sharp ear for ordinary American speech, petty status anxiety, male vanity, family loyalty, local institutions, and the way minor humiliations can swell into moral crusades if fed enough oxygen. Not quite satire in the broad cartoon sense; more like a careful comedy of escalation, where people behave ridiculously while remaining recognisably themselves. 

Delta / Seymour Lawrence paperback edition, first Delta printing, June 1984. Good second-hand condition overall, with visible cover creasing, rubbing, edgewear, and age toning.