Thomas Berger—an Appreciation
It’s more than a bit late to write an appreciative essay on Thomas Berger, who died in 2014, but I felt compelled to do so after rereading Killing Time, one of my favorite novels by him.
Thomas Berger was the author of more than two dozen novels and is best known for Little Big Man, which later became a movie starring Dustin Hoffman. Berger also acquired some notoriety with his quartet of Reinhart novels, which concern Carlo Reinhart, an American army medic stationed in Germany shortly after the end of World War II. Berger also ventured into some disparate genres and styles: science fiction (Regiment of Women), the detective novel (Who is Teddy Villanova?), the Arthurian legend (Arthur Rex), and an update on Robinson Crusoe (Robert Crews).
But the Berger novels that have caught my attention the most are the ones with a small cast in a small town where invariably a misunderstanding of a minor kind is blown up all out of proportion, a Kafkaesque quality whereby banal social situations and encounters descend into anarchy and mayhem. Or as Berger once put it, “It was Kafka who taught me that at any moment banality might turn sinister, for existence was not meant to be unfailingly genial.” Sneaky People and Neighbors are standouts in this regard, but perhaps the exemplar of this category of anarchic realism is his 1983 novel, The Feud, which came close to winning the Pulitzer Prize; Anne Tyler said it’s Berger’s “comic masterpiece.”
Five years after his death literary eclipse seems to be setting in. Maybe this is a malady with comic novelists. (Look at how Peter De Vries is faring, though I was surprised to see recently that George Will is a fan.) It should be noted, however, that Berger resented being called a “comic novelist,” and despite claiming that his goal, in his later years, was “to be grimmer and grimmer and grimmer,” the “comic novelist” appellation seems apt because, in the words of Jonathan Lethem, “Berger isn’t comic. He, like life, is merely, and hugely, fucking funny.” And yet Berger’s deadpan comic sensibility is underappreciated (many of his novels are out of print or are available only as ebooks), and so in effort to shine a brighter light on Berger’s style, I thought I would examine a couple of paragraphs from Killing Time.
The scene is a diner. Joe Detweiler is waiting to be served:
Again he was ignored. The counterman as of old worked with his brown rag. Detweiler lifted the napkin dispenser, found it of suitable weight — for he knew what he was doing and though enraged was not the victim of a feckless impulse — and with ardent force and commanding accuracy threw it into the counterman’s head.
The target jerked with the impact, white cap flying off as though winged. He fell forward into the coffee urn, cut his mouth or nose on a gleaming tap, folded, dropped to the floor behind the counter, bleeding for and aft. The other eaters froze in their respective positions, one with fork in the air; another averted his eyes for a long moment.
It’s the formal language here — “as of old,” “for and aft,” “found it of suitable weight” (not “found the weight suitable”) — that creates the humor. And that “white cap flying off as though winged” made me laugh out loud (actually, it was “as though winged” that did it). Another: An insensitive editor might have deleted “in their respective positions,” but the near-irrelevancy of this clause adds to the comic effect (near irrelevancy because if the eaters froze, well, we know they froze in whatever positions that happened to be in at that moment). Also, the rhythm and tempo describing the counterman’s collapse is great, with that lone word, “folded,” almost placed dead center in the sentence giving a sense of impending collapse.
Another aspect of Berger’s technique emerges here, where he applies his tendency to dehumanize certain actions and scenes (“the target jerked,” not “the counterman jerked”), seemingly describing events and actions as if populated in a universe containing nothing more than impersonal, corporeal objects in motion (clearly, a very omniscient narrator).
I also love his rich, tossed-off character details, such as this, also from Killing Time. A detective is considering a piece of sculpture as possible evidence in a crime: “Art seldom was complete in itself and asked too much of him; in its presence he grew peevish.” So true (that first observation), and “peevish” strikes just the right tone. Not “uncomfortable” or “unsettling,” but peevish. Berger’s careful use of language reminds me of a comment made by Tom Perrotta: “[Berger] never winks at the reader and recounts the most outlandish actions in matter-of-fact, almost hypnotically precise language.”
A Thomas Berger revival is overdue. Certainly Random House’s Modern Library could reissue his four Carlo Reinhart novels (Crazy in Berlin, Reinhart in Love, Vital Parts, Reinhart’s Women) as a matching set. For now, I will leave you with this, from William J. Schafer:
“Thomas Berger’s novels exhibit an extraordinary comic sensibility, a satiric talent for wild caricature, and a concern for the quality of middle-class life in middle America. His novels chronicle the decline and fall of the Common Man in 20th-century America and meticulous detail the absurdities of our civilizations. Berger is one of the subtlest and most accurate parodists writing today, with a flawless sense of style and proportion that is charged with comic vitality.”
Barry Lyons is a freelance writer living in New York City. He maintains that when putting together a list of one’s five favorite Beatles songs, certain rules must be adhered to.
