Thomas Berger (1) (1924–2014)

Thomas Berger died on July 13, 2014. I had no idea, until a friend of mine and fellow-Berger-admirer emailed me. That it wasn’t a national story (like the deaths of other writers) is part of what keeps Berger’s fans in a state of constant disbelief. I had stumbled upon Sneaky People for the first time in the early 1990s. It was the first of Berger’s novels I had read and it led me to the rest of them, all 20 or so, my teaching a number of them at Rutgers, and a long correspondence with show more the great man. That I was rereading Sneaky People at the time of his death—and that a post-it on my computer reminded me to “write Berger”—are details that, had they appeared in novels, one might have dismissed as too cute and coincidental. But they’re true. Over time, Berger has sent me inscribed copies of his books and long replies to my letters, ones that included genuine conversation, as opposed to “Thank you for your inquiry,” etc.

Sneaky People is as good a place as any to begin with Berger. Published in 1975 but set in Berger’s beloved Midwest of the 1930s, it tells of used-car salesman Buddy Sandifer’s plan to have his wife killed so he can enjoy the fruits of is mistress without her constantly nagging him. Buddy is the worst of the lot, but there is plenty of sneakiness to go around. This is one of those books that, the less you know about it before picking it up, the better. There’s a laugh on every other page. Certain readers of the FDA-approval-camp should be warned that there are no delicacies here, and if you delight in being “offended” by the bad behavior of fictional creations, you should pick up something else.

Few contemporary writers are as good as Berger at having the narrator match the sensibilities and assumptions of the characters. Berger was so good at this; the vulgarity of his characters’ minds is reflected perfectly in the prose. His trademark pitch-perfect sentences appear on every other page. And Chapter 11, a thirty-page set piece detailing how Buddy’s mistress became a whore and the rest of her awful life, might be the best thing he ever wrote. As a short story, it could stand beside work by Cheever, Hemingway, or O’Connor.

David Mamet has a good essay about how much he enjoyed O’Brien’s Aubrey Martin series and how he sat down to write him a letter to tell him as much—when his wife showed him O’Brien’s obituary. Mamet told his wife, “This fellow has created characters and stories that are part of my life.” The same holds true for Berger and his readers. Even his lesser works (Best Friends, Suspects, Changing the Past) are never dull, and he only wrote two certifiable duds (Nowhere and Regiment of Women) out of 23. The triumphs of The Feud, Arthur Rex, Neighbors, Rinehart in Love more than make up for them. Thomas Berger, Great American Writer, R.I.P. show less

This is a romp of a book, like Flashman, though slightly more believable.'

Berger gets to the heart of western language. He's direct, profane, awkwardly pedantic at times, in ways I imagine people were when they tried to be formal. By turns, the book is funny, poignant, and insightful.

A must for anyone who wants to understand the American west, and, indeed, the United States and its protracted genocide against the native peoples could do worse than start with Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at show more Wounded Knee and Thomas Berger's Little Big Man. show less

This is like no other book I have read. Twenty four hours in nearly 300 pages reads almost like real-time, which works well in this story of strange neighbours. Each individual incident is plausible, but in combination, it creates an acutely observed surreal nightmare of escalating paranoia.

Earl and Enid are are in their late 40s (but seem older) and long time residents of a quiet road. Their predicable life is overturned by the arrival of new neighbours. Harry and Ramona's unabashed show more presumptiousness and mind games make Earl lose touch with reality and doubt his sanity: trespass, pointless lies, vandalism and worse.

It's bad enough when strangers are weird and unpleasant, but it is far worse when they are in your own home and when your own family, friends and even random strangers seem to be against you for no reason. And it is relentless, "He believed that she and Harry worked by attrition" so that "Every time he believed he had got things in hand at last, another threat appeared".

At one point, Ramona says "ownership means everything to you" and also asks "how far would you go to avoid humiliation?", which are the crux of the mental assault. This makes Earl behave increasingly out of character, "His persistent conviction that he had been mocked... relieved him of the claims of decency".

No matter how he tries to play it, Earl finds himself wrong-footed by bizarre behaviour and strange non sequiturs. At one point, Ramona has taken over his bed and when challenged, says "It's your house, your bedroom, your bed. What's fair? Do we get any kind of vote?"

One quirk is the overuse of the word "chagrin", even as a verb, "chagrining though it might be"! Nevertheless, it is a painfully realised and expertly written book.

Near the beginning, it mentions that Earl is prone to hallucinations ("he was at odds with humanity as to one of its incontestable truths: seeing is believing"), but it is not mentioned again. So how much of the story is real? show less

When I was a kid, I read about cowboys and indians. Yeah, I know, I was born a few generations after the big wave of that stuff, but there was still Lucky Luke and Tintin In America and my dad's old 50s adventure books and plastic bows and arrows and toy guns.

Then, just as I was starting to discover newer stories where the white man was the evil colonist and the Native Americans were the innocent, nature-loving philosophers who cried every time someone dropped a gum wrapper, I saw Little Big show more Man. The movie version starring Dustin Hoffman, that is. And a lot of things changed there.

Little Big Man, both the movie and the novel it was based on (which I've now read for the first time) is about Jack Crabb. Jack is 111 at the beginning of the story in the mid-1950s, one of the oldest living Americans, and the last survivor (or so he claims) of the battle of Little Bighorn, where the combined forces of Sioux and Cheyenne soundly defeated the US cavalry for the first and last time. Except he's not just Jack Crabb, he's also Little Big Man; that's the name the Cheyenne gave him after they adopted him as a 10-year-old boy after killing most of the people in the wagon train he was travelling on. For the next 25 years, he spends his life drifting back and forth between his two lives; a Cheyenne brave watching his world disappear, or a white man trying to make a living in the new society that's growing out of the so-called Wild West - as gold digger, poker player, rich dandy, poor drinker, muleskinner, con man, anything. He has one family each by a Mexican woman, a white woman, and a Cheyenne woman. Does Jack Crabb run into every single famous person from Wyatt Earp to General Custer? You bet he does. Does Little Big Man witness racism, marginalisation and massacres of his people? Of course he does. It's almost too much. It's almost so you'd agree with the (fictional) post scriptum: either he's telling the complete truth, or he's lying about all of it.

So far I'd been a great admirer of civilization, but I figured that was because I hadn't come in touch with the process of its creation.

Little Big Man isn't a flawless literary masterpiece in terms of prose - it's not supposed to be, as it's allegedly just a typed interview with an old decrepit man, and probably could have used a ghostwriter (at least try and get him to stick to one tense in each sentense). As a pure adventure novel about the death of one civilisation and the rise of another it's excellent, thrilling, horrifying, hilarious and moving in equal parts, but there are a lot of those around too. Its greatest strength, what struck me so hard about the movie and works just as well here, is the fantastic detail in the description of life both on the prairie and in the frontier towns, and the fairness. (Allegedly, the native American actors in the movie refused to believe that the book was written by a white man.) Here, neither Cheyenne nor Americans are presented as exclusively good or bad - if anything, they're all a bit foolish, including Jack himself and possibly the reader, if we believe everything he tells us. They're all just human beings, prone to violence and irrationality, with a ton of history on their shoulders, hung up on honour and pride, blind to their own prejudices and all too willing to see the other side's. (This goes for our narrator too - even after all he's gone through, Jack Crabb remains a bit of a racist, a product of his time.) Berger, born three generations after all of this happened, brings both people and time to proud, foolish life. And, as a final reminder of the times, the novel ends by somewhat clumsily pointing at something that was just starting to happen in East Asia. Oh well, you can't have everything.

Now, all the above should be read with a caveat. See, I read this in translation, which normally isn't a problem, but the new Swedish translation is so atrociously bad you'd think the translator thought this was just one of my dad's 50s boy's adventures about whitehats and redskins - so bad that I find it difficult to say just how good this novel would be in English. show less