Their free-spirited personalities and overbearing and boorish behavior endear them to Enid and Elaine, but Earl fears that he is losing control of his life and his family.

"[2] Berger's off-kilter tone blurs the line between paranoia and reality, defense and offense, action and intention, ally and adversary.

Yet Earl comes to realize that Harry and Ramona 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.

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."

[citation needed] 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 .