"My intention is not to satirize or make fun of the various genres I undertake, but to celebrate them. I think you’re right when you say my contributions are not parodies. My intention is to add to and not take from."

—Thomas Berger, letter¹

For novelists, two paths have led traditionally to the Parnassus of popular acclaim, and Thomas Berger has travelled neither. As a consequence, and to our disgrace, this major writer has so far garnered few of the prizes the literati bestow on one another, and (apart from the film-fed celebrity of Little Big Man [1964] and Neighbors [1980]) remains far less well-known to the reading public than he has long and eminently deserved to be. One path has been through the groves of academe: Authors, like Joyce, whose works overtly solicit, indeed insist on, critical exegesis, are naturally enough championed by literary scholars who need texts upon which they can visibly exercise their craft, just as analysts need patients who want their dreams deciphered, and lawyers need clients of litigious disposition. Critics, wary in general of works not already safely validated by Time, and suspicious besides of fiction as opposed to fictivity, are likely to shy away from any but the most "textual" of contemporary novels.

In the so-called "school of black comedy" in which Berger has been rather haphazardly placed, the last American novel to attract a thick swarm of academics was Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Pynchon, already the subject of full-length scholarly studies, announced his "significance" by modernist techniques, a polysemous allusiveness and periodic lyric flight. Berger, for all his perceived "cerebral brilliance" (not to mention the range of his canon), appears more accessible, and therefore is not taken as seriously. As yet, his work has received nowhere near the critical attention given even Joseph Heller, his contemporary, and author of the most popular of the World War II "black comedies," Catch-22 (1961). Berger’s first novel, Crazy in Berlin (1958) came too early to gather the college cult that Heller and Vonnegut were to win in the sixties—and win with it places on reading lists in college courses. Besides, Berger’s characters are insufficiently adolescent—Carlo Reinhart, for example, being neither fetchingly nuts like Yossarian or BillyPilgrim, nor shiny with fey innocence like Holden Caulfield or Garp or Tom Robbins’ heroines.

Another contemporary of Berger’s, cometed into Manhattan’s literary firmament by a first novel on the war, is our major living example of the alternative path to Parnassus: the Romantic route. Norman Mailer’s books are variations on a personal mythology; as with a movie star, his writings are fused in the public’s mind with the publicized myth of the man. The great triumvirate of this Byronic variety—novelists more read about than read, more written about than they wrote—remains Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wolfe, all of whom were brought to fame, significantly, by the also mythologized editor, Maxwell Perkins. There is nothing of this personal nature in Berger’s work. It is language, not self-expression, that absorbs him; voices, not Voice. He has never shown the slightest interest in broadcasting either youthful melancholia or middle-aged angst. If the hero of his Rinehart "Quintet" may in any sense be said to speak for his author (and I should think this a dangerous assumption), Carlo is in any case far too wry a man to keep romantically awash in the poignant disenchantment that popularized a Jake Barnes or Dick Diver.

Nor has Berger any public myth, unless it be the recent, and to him amusing, efforts to depict him as an unreachable recluse. While it is true that he takes no part in the New York flashdance (having concluded long ago that it is our sad fate to live in an age when "the Philistines are the intelligentsia"), he is by no means a social misanthrope, but rather as warm, ebullient, and charming a hermit as anyone is likely to meet. We are unlikely, however, to meet him on a talk show. Berger is a writer (a private act), not a Writer (a public art), nor an Author (a critical cult). In analyzing why Thornton Wilder never became a star, Malcolm Cowley pointed out how different from one another all his works were, how various in social setting, in time, in form and theme. We can observe in Thomas Berger’s novel the same variety, with the same results, for this kind of decentralized range and impersonality, coupled with readerly accessibility, make it difficult for critics (or fans) to "get a fix" on a writer. A sensibility, choosing freely among disparate styles and structures, is less readily extracted than a forefronted persona or overriding myth. Arthur Rex (1978) is a chivalric romance; Regiment of Women (1973), anti-Utopian science fiction; Killing Time (1967), a roman policier with the sharp flat sheen of a 1940s film noir; Little Big Man, a picaresque frontier epic in the national Twain vein; Sneaky

People (1975), smalltown social comedy in the tradition of fellow Midwesterner Booth Tarkington; Neighbors, domestic Beckett in farce form.

Moreover, narrative style (monochromatic, and so immediately identifiable, in writers like Vonnegut) changes from one Berger comedy to the next. Not only are the first-person narrators highly varied; each of the omniscient narrators is distinctively idiosyncratic: The style of lyrical whimsy and heroic sentiment peculiar to the chivalric, carnal, Christian author of Arthur Rex is no more like the ironic, detached author of Killing Time than Jack Crabb’s hyperbolic humor in Little Big Man resembles detective Russel Wren’s deadpan literary wordplay in Who Killed Teddy Villanova? (1977). They do all, of course, share Something—Berger’s unique sensibility—but of what it might consist has never been satisfactorily explained, or even explored. And it is unique sensibility. Berger remarked once, in a discussion about editors, that in twenty-five years of publishing, he had had almost nothing to do with them: "My vision is so peculiarly my own that another human being has a hard time getting his foot in the door." As for himself, he has little interest in making distinctions among his books, except to say that Villanova was the easiest to write, and Crazy in Berlin the hardest (because first), and that he liked them all, and would "in any case never admit to disliking any."

Reviewers have sensed from the beginning that Berger is "One of a small group of important American writers," but they have remained uneasy about defining why. Since he writes comedies, and aligns himself with traditional narrative genres (romance, picaresque, mystery), and since the only high-fashion literary relation to comedy and genre today is parodic and satiric, these reviewers, in order to take him seriously, have toppled into the perfunctory collective habit of calling him a satirist: a modernist offering a "bleakly comic account of the world’s malevolent absurdity" (Kenneth Graham), a parodist "sending up" traditions, and so ranked, by the New York Times, with Philip Roth "among our first-rate literary wise guys." It is occasionally added that he is a nihilistic satirist, so flippant "he cannot resist drawing almost anything he happens to know into the circle of his ridicule" (Leslie Fiedler). To call Berger a joker "without moral earnestness" is preposterous, but the charge underlies the equally false conclusion that books like Arthur Rex and Little Big Man are parodies; Sneaky People and Neighbors, social satires.

Berger is not only not a satirist; he keeps saying he is not a satirist. He wrote shortly before Neighbors was published, "Those who believe my intent is to criticize society, to satirize, to write spoofs and send-ups, to be that most humorless of scribblers, the so-called comic novelist, are utterly misguided. I write for the purpose of providing myself with an alternative to reality. Nevertheless, be prepared to read many reviews of Neighbors that confidently announce my success or failure at holding the mirror up to suburban society." Now, fiction writers cannot always be relied upon to admit (or to know) what they’re doing, but in this case, Berger knows better both his own texts and the conventions in which they are founded. Satires are by tradition works intending to reform our vices and follies by ridicule (gentle or bitter) and by moral judgment (urbane or indignant). Berger might well agree with Juvenal that it is difficult not to write satire these days (he jokes that he will join an amateur theatrical society of which I’m a member if we agree to cast him as Timon of Athens, Thersites, or Tom O’Bedlam), but he feels no compulsion to vex the world in print with his moral disapproval—at least not in any hope of teaching it a lesson.

Perhaps Berger views the world as past remedy, but I rather think he suffers fools so gladly in fiction because he delights in the creation of their folly. Once when I fairly idiotically asked him what he meant by saying "In my own work I have tried to compete with that reality to which I must submit in life," he replied, "My interest is in creation, not in commentary." Of the writers he told me were his "tutelary masters," only Kafka would seem to fit the typical view of Berger’s tone and style. The others were Dickens, Shakespeare, Melville, Balzac and Proust, all great creators of characters, who never sacrifice depth of individuation to belletristic play. What first struck me about Berger’s novels was the delight he takes in writing, in literary forms themselves, and in the particular world of language (the stylistic system) each intrinsically inhabits. (The sensitivity to dialect in the 1930s Midwestern Sneaky People or The Feud is as much a linguistic tour de force as the medievalness of Arthur Rex.) By talking about a delight in literary forms, I do not mean fictions about fictivity, or writing about writing, but instead the wide-ranging way in which (with the exception of the Rinehart novels), it is Berger’s pattern to generate fiction by the fusion of his "peculiar vision" with strongly defined, traditional narrative modes—like the Western "biography," the Arthurian chronicle, the mystery. This

is experimental writing, but because modern critics tend to limit their perception of "experimental" to violations of conventions like syntax, diction, or typography, and to the evaporation of "story," Berger’s extraordinary technical and verbal virtuosity has gone largely unremarked, even by enthusiasts. Most often, he’s acclaimed for being "funny," as if he were Peter de Vries.

He is, of course, not the only writer of comedy (as opposed to comic writer) to have his novels indiscriminately praised as "outrageous satires," "hilarious farces," burlesques and parodies. Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (as perfect and painful a novella about salvation as Wise Blood) was called by Edmund Wilson a "comic epic" and by Erskine Caldwell "a good satire on life and living in this area." Terms for comedy have long been a hodgepodge of jumbled misuse, tossed about as loose synonyms for tone. Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (which bears a relation to the eighteenth-century British picaresque similar to that of Little Big Man to the nineteenth-century American) was called a "boisterous farce," a "bareknuckled satire," an "historical novel" and (by its author) a "moral allegory."

Unfortunately, mislabeling leads to misreading. Parody and burlesque are caricatures; the first, a ridiculing imitation of a work or its author’s style (Shamela of Pamela, Hemingway’s Torrents of Spring of Sherwood Anderson); the second, a comic disjunction between style and subject matter (as in Pope’s mock epic, The Rape of the Lock). To call Arthur Rex a parody or burlesque, rather than a twentieth-century adaptation of the "Matter of Britain"—as Tennyson’s Idylls of the King is a nineteenth-century adaptation—is to misread the novel. In fact, both in its earthy texture and elegiac wistfulness, in the elaborate weave of its vast interlace structure, Berger’s version comes closer to the Gawain poet and to Malory than most of the interpreters in between. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is a burlesque. Arthur Rex profoundly participates in, as it reinterprets, the values of chivalric romance. In a letter about a screenplay he’d read on the Arthur story, Berger spoke jokingly of his own preparation for his novel. The scriptwriter had apparently read "none of Malory, Chretien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Alfred Tennyson, Dick Wagner’s Tristan and Parsifal and the many other forerunners whose works I ransacked (including two books for children which were my principal sources). This unbelievable trashy practitioner had invented his own Arthurian narrative!" The comment is indicative of Berger’s

respect and familiar affection for the legend and its tellers, and his serious claim to a place among them.

Arthur Rex is not spoofing the unattainable dream of rightness, harmony and goodness for which Arthur stands, nor the splendor of heroism like Lancelot’s, nor beauty like Guinivere’s, nor love like Tristram’s. The fall of Camelot is not mocked, but sorrowed over: ". . . some say he will return when the world is ready once more to celebrate honor and bravery and nobility, but methinks that is a long time yet." The book’s bawdy comedy is no more anachronistic than Chaucer (in fact, Berger interpolates the Wife of Bath’s tale into the plot), nor is the narrative style an antiquarian joke; it has the wit and whimsical charm of a Celtic illumination. In short, Arthur Rex is whole cloth—a twentieth-century weaver at work with medieval threads on a tapestry, not a cartoon.

It might seem that an easier case could be made for defining Regiment of Women as a social satire, despite Berger’s claim that he doesn’t write them. But considering that some readers have thought it a spoof of the women’s movement, and others a feminist assault on chauvinism, if it is a satire, its social target is extremely ambiguous. A comparison with a straightforward satire like Orwell’s Animal Farm reveals a fundamental difference in both intent and methodology. Both take the traditional satire form of the anti-Utopia: Animal Farm (like the fourth book of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) uses zoomorphic fable. Regiment of Women (like Butler’s Erewhon, Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s own 1984) focuses on the struggle of a human sexual love against a futuristic totalitarian government’s desexualizing, dehumanizing control. Orwell’s target, in his parable of the rise of Napoleon the pig from revolutionary to tyrant, is as clear as a party slogan: Freedom good, totalitarianism bad. He tells us so. "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism." It is difficult to imagine Berger stating such an ideological credo, though I’m certain he is as opposed to dictators as he is to demagogues.

The comedy of Animal Farm derives from the substitution of animal for human stereotypes (the proletarian workhorse, the mob of sheep). In Regiment of Women, it is male and female sex role stereotypes that are reversed. The humor comes from incongruities that expose how inculturated these stereotypes are; transposed pronouns and adjectives shock: "You never knew when you might meet a sex criminal or, perhaps worse, a junkie

desperate for funds with which to support her habit." The hero, once a very "masculine" that is, obsequious, love-hungry, weepy, frigid, and mechanically inept receptionist, who loves to cook and read books like "The Gentle Man’s Guide to Needlepoint," who wears babydoll nightgowns and "very virile earrings," suddenly reveals an "effeminate streak of brutality" and strikes back at the thuggish women cops who’ve arrested him for putting on corduroy slacks and a plaid shirt. Berger extends this reversing conceit from attire to psychology and social position. Women are the generals, surgeons, lawyers, politicians, artists, athletes, and criminals. They are considered more intelligent, more aggressive, and less emotional: they run the world and create its art; they also start wars, rape, and aren’t in touch with their feelings. All they talk about is "work and politics and sports and their bank accounts."

Men are secretaries and sex objects. They are considered charming, personal, sensitive, chattering, jealous, passive incompetents. Ultimately, the hero is brought to the realization that men have no power because they have penises, which make them vulnerable. "This and this alone is why men are basically inferior," why they need dolls and pets and can’t play sports, why "men are made to be manipulated and penetrated." The ironies move in every direction, undercutting every position. It is absurd for women to behave like men; it was absurd for men to have behaved that way. It is absurd for men to behave like women; it was absurd for women to have behaved that way.

From their Huxleyish incubator hatcheries to the need for gas masks against a constant Pollution Alert, the regiment of women has made as much a botch of their brave new world as did any patriarchy. In describing that world, Berger turns to his anti-Utopian predecessors like Huxley and Orwell; in fact, his futuristic society is in many ways a comic version of the dreadful, loveless, mirthless Oceania of 1984: The economy has collapsed under inflation; the cities are rotting (Central Park is a rubbish heap of compacted garbage beneath buildings); the caste system subjects all but a few elite to crowded dingy slums, harassment and deprivation; government control and censorship is pervasive (possession of photos of women nursing or of Hemingway’s Men Without Women is illegal, Men’s Libbers are subject to castration), and is thwarted only by computer breakdown; the doublethink Newspeak jargon of the Female Establishment is used to enforce orthodoxy and control the past. History is rewritten to delete

all reference to any period when women were not considered superior to men—artists like Thomasina Gainsborough and Leonarda, painter of the Mono Liso, are glorified. It is possible that even the name of Berger’s hero (Georgie Cornell) is a (subliminal at least) reference to George Orwell’s influence.

Like Orwell’s unwilling hero, Smith, Georgie joins the Underground. "The Brothers" indoctrinate him to see himself as a slave of a power structure which must be brought down, without, however, men taking on the brutal natures of their oppressors. Like Smith, Georgie learns that the Underground is a handy, harmless Establishment tool. Like Smith, Georgie is brought into war against the State first by circumstance, then by affection for a woman; in this case, Harriet, a gentle F.B.I. agent committed for treatment as a recidivist after confessing that as a child she preferred dolls to guns. If Berger is "saying" that power corrupts—whether men or women hold it—he is also "saying" that collective protests against those systems of power are not only futile but ridiculous. The sadistic establishment psychiatrist (who charges Georgie $300 an hour for her anal rape therapy) and the tender liberal psychiatrist (who wants to help raise his Basic Awareness) are equally inane. Government and Underground are both ludicrous. The sweeping zaniness closes round into a self-contained whole, dissipating our indignation; social satire, while pervasive, is finally coincidental. Our responses are instead those elicited by all of Berger’s comedies, whatever the generic model they have incorporated. One, we share the aesthetic delight he himself has in the traditions of form and their capacity to release characters and language. Two, we are brought comically, as with Beckett, to confront our metaphysical (as opposed to our social) bewilderment. Three, we share the emotional yearning for human love, harmony and nobility that is persistently drawing Berger towards those romance elements of his tradition that help make his novels true comedies, always a much more serious (and moral) business than burlesque.

This third response is evoked, for example, by the end of Regiment of Women. Unlike the defeated lovers of 1984, Georgie and Harriet are not destroyed or co-opted by the system, nor do they defeat it. Instead, they leave it—to flee to the Maine wilderness; and there, by a series of mishaps that burn up all their supplies and clothes, they literally begin the race anew; each "a blank tablet on which anything might be inscribed," as they stand naked in the Edenic lake. They will cultivate their garden,

and raise a family, and presumably take turns "being boss." The retreat to the "green world" is the impulse not of satire but of comedy, at least of the branch of comedy that replaced the satirical conventions and societal setting of classical comedy with the romance conventions of comedic writers from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Dickens and Joyce. The impulse is a strong one in Berger, as well as a complex and ambiguous one. The comedic movement is towards communal harmony (usually symbolized by the sexual communion of marriage that ends the novel or play). The commitment of comedy is to the triumph of life (Falstaff leaps up from the dead, Tom Jones is cut free from the noose, Molly Bloom says yes); In addition to the technical opportunities that traditional comedic narrative modes give Berger to explore his verbal craft—comedy, being social, is always in some sense ‘about’ language—these earlier modes draw him as well by the pull of the earlier values of comedy: communion, order, and harmony. So high is his esteem for these values, so low is his estimation of the modern world, that he cannot locate his comedy in a contemporary setting, but chooses forms that give him generic access to such themes. It is as if the further he sets his stage from "modern civilization" (in his view, a misnomer, anyhow), the more room his characters have to feel "the old verities" (the nobility with which Old Lodge Skins dies, the graced courtesy with which Sir Gawain lives); the more place there is for them in the circle of comedy’s dance.

The circle is Berger’s persistent metaphor for the "at-oneness" into which comedy invites us, and against which—in life—disorder and estrangement have almost inevitably triumphed. Camelot’s Round Table of chivalric knights is broken by the forces of the serpent Mordred. The Cheyenne of Little Big Man are "doomed as knights in stone castles." For the Indians, "time turns in a circle, present and past, living and ghost, for the Mystery is continuous." This "mystical circle" is "the round of the earth and the sun, and life and death too, for the disjunction between them is a matter of appearance and not the true substance." The Cheyenne, who see "no power in a square," are destroyed by the white race of "powerful death lovers," who have turned the earth into a dead "world of sharp corners." Theirs is the race that "progressed" from covered wagons to the cars that Buddy sells in Sneaky People, and that Buddy’s descendants ultimately drove to those dead-end, isolated cul-de-sacs of suburban developments where Earl Keese runs afoul of his Neighbors, where

all is absurdist disjunction between appearances, (substance, long lost), where communion is impossible because "communication" is a maddening dialogue of non sequiturs whose terrible inconsequentiality has even more terrible consequences.

And so Berger returns to chivalric Camelot, to the Iliadic Old West, to the codes of honor of 1930s detective fiction to the 1930s small towns of his childhood’s Midwest, in both Sneaky People and The Feud (1983), where sidewalks curve, connecting life to life, and if there are families of Montagues and Capulets feuding, there are also Romeos and Juliets. In saying that the conservatism intrinsic to comedy is congenial to Berger, I should quickly add that he is no sentimentalist, nostalgically afloat in a prettified past. Compare, for instance, the whore-with-a-heart-of-gold who beautifully initiates the young boy in Faulkner’s The Reivers with the same character in Berger’s Sneaky People. Faulkner’s character marries her simple, noble knight, and they name their first child after that young boy; Berger’s character realizes her knight is a cad, considers entering a convent, finds it closed, and returns to prostitution. Nor is Berger a romantic primitivist. Jack Crabb (Little Big Man) honors the Indians as noble, natural, vital, well-mannered, sane and heroic; he also finds them crude, nasty, smelly, barbaric, and ignorant. His story of the harmonizing "magic circle" in which the tribe captures 1,000 antelope is followed by the story of Indian women and children exuberantly scalping and disemboweling dead and wounded enemies after a raid. If Jack has the all-American Huck Finn itch to escape ("I got to go off now. . . . The trouble is I don’t think I can ever be civilized"), he also admires the white "triumph over the empty wilderness" and all the artifacts and aspirations of white civilization. He both hates and glories in General George Armstrong Custer. So does Berger, just as he thinks Lancelot is both a magnificent hero and a dangerous idiot. That is also Guinivere’s opinion, but then Guinivere is as wise and irrational (and as incomprehensible to the narrator) as the Lady of the Lake, with her true magic, is to Merlin, with his wizard’s tricks. Almost all Berger’s women live in this sealed, ineluctable universe, baffling and alarming to the men around them, and if Berger could be said to have single social leitmotif, it is probably Freud’s ultimate question: "What is it that women want?"

What Peggy Tumulty in Who Killed Teddy Villanova? wants is the hero, Russel Wren; that she gets him, and the book ends with their first embrace, is another example of Berger’s move

towards comedy; in this case, against the grain of his literary model—the hard-boiled detective novel. Villanova is as close as Berger has come to parody (which may be why he says it was the easiest book to write), but, again, the parodic elements are ultimately coincidental to the comedic core. All the conventions are here—the Chandler/Hammett private-eye, the intricate (if not undecipherable) plot, the eccentric cast, the continual beatings, sudden corpses, the sexuality, the grimy urban world; everything from Sam Spade’s loyal, tough secretary and fat man villain to Marlowe’s stained washbowl and Lew Archer’s sagging couch. The opening line, "Call me Russel Wren" is an echo of the "My name’s Marlowe" style. However, it is also, of course, a paraphrase of the opening line of Moby Dick ("Call me Ishmael"). And when we immediately learn that detective Wren is an out-of-work English literature teacher and a playwright, whose polysyllabic diction and erudite references bespeak his lost profession, and whose interrogation by a policeman named Zwingli (partners—Knox and Calvin) takes the form of a literary oral exam, we are prepared for something other, and more than, a stylistic send-up of the melancholic machismo sentimental cynicism at the core of the American detective genre.

What we have is not a parodic exaggeration of the style, plot and characters of this narrative tradition, but their celebration, and their interpolation into a typical Berger comedy: its coupling of romance (the relationship between Russel and Peggy; the fanciful adventures and chivalric codes of the detective) with metaphysical humor. By the last, odd phrase, I mean that the comic troubles of Berger’s characters are likely to be epistemological in nature. The answer to the question, Who Killed Teddy Villanova?, is not to be solved by Joe Friday’s "just the facts, ma’am." Wren (like Ed Keese in Neighbors) is frantically trying to sort out what he can know to be "real" from what proves to be "fictional," a mere appearance, and trying to come to some conclusion about how to differentiate the two—if, indeed, it is possible, or meaningful, to do so. Whereas the plots of the detective novel unravel to reveal the real threads that connect them, Villanova’s labyrinthine plot unravels to reveal its utter fabrication. All the events (arrests, conspiracies, murders) prove to be totally "false," as it were, a literary creation of one Sam Polidor (a better playwright than the hero), who has hired actors and staged scenes entirely for the purpose of persuading Wren to vacate his Manhattan office so that Sam can sell the building.

In other words, Sam is a master plotter in the Prospero vein, and the story of Berger’s novel is Sam’s creation.

The fabrications through which Earl Keese doggedly gropes for the "truth," despite the constant lesson that seeing is not believing, nor words immutable, reveal more profoundly the epistemological roots to Berger’s comedy, and lie behind his comment that Neighbors’ "morality is metaphysical and has no social significance," although critics were likely to think it a social satire. (And indeed, Christopher Lehman-Haupt was to sum up: "Neighbors parodies all the rituals of neighborliness.") The abundant burlesque elements in Berger’s work (the avalanching hyperboles and incongruities, the sudden plummets from sublimity to slapstick) are not there to mock his literary progenitors, or to lash society for its own betterment; they are there because "the world" makes no sense, and innate (and comic) in the human condition is the desire that it should make sense.

There is a wide gulf between those comedic circles of harmony, order, courtesy and honor for which Berger has an undeniable attachment, and the existential disjunction from "Reality" in which he perceives us necessarily to live. (We cannot be, nor would we choose to be Old Lodge Skins, for whom the universe is "self-explanatory.") Fiction is Berger’s bridge across the gulf. He is careful to insist that the bridge cannot reach over into the world. Nearly all his comments about fiction emphasize its self-containment, its distinction from life. It is "an alternative to reality." Arthur Rex "was never historical, but everything he did was true." The "editor" of Little Big Man (whose middle name in this picaresque comic epic is, significantly, "Fielding") worries whether Jack Crabb is history’s "most neglected hero or a liar of insane proportions." His concern is irrelevant. The Preface to Killing Time tells us that "a work of fiction is a construction of language, and otherwise a lie."

Thomas Berger goes about comedy’s business of choosing life, by killing time. The "hero" of his book of that title is an insane idiot (in Dostoevski’s sense), and an artist. He murders three people. He does so to kill Time. "To kill Time is to know God." By killing these people, he "Realizes" them, creates their eternity. "Realization," he explains to his disturbed lawyer, is the culmination of art, and the transcendence of Time. "Realization" is the function of fiction. The achievement of the best fiction-makers, like Thomas Berger, is to triumph over Time, not by

the mocking murders of their predecessors, but by continual recreation. Prefacing Who Killed Teddy Villanova? is a line of Baudelaire’s: "We are all celebrating some funeral." Berger is not announcing here the death of a narrative form, nor his plan parodically to dance on the grave. The celebration is a commemoration. The ceremony is a new work of art. Baudelaire’s line is from "On the Heroism of Modern Life." The heroism of Thomas Berger as a modern novelist—the risky and as yet insufficiently acknowledged or rewarded heroism—is to honor the traditions in whose line he takes his place, and whose forms he makes uniquely his own, to go about the act of writing without either self-heralding or the trumpets of the academy, and to keep on quietly creating fictions.

    Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Berger are taken from his letters to the author.