BEING INVISIBLE By Thomas Berger Little, Brown. 262 pp. $16.95 FRED Wagner is surveying himself disgustedly in the bedroom mirror when suddenly he begins to disappear. Not that it matters much. By his own account, he's already insubstantial. Pushing hard at 40, prissy,...

Simon & Schuster, 2003. 209 pp. $24.00. Best Friends is Thomas Berger's twenty-second novel and evidence that his ironic, inventive muse remains as vibrant as ever. Without the fanfare that should accompany his brilliant accomplishments, Berger has created a fictional oeuvre as...

Crazy in Berlin takes its epigraph from an old song: "You are crazy, my child; You must go to Berlin…." Title and epigraph provide a suitable focus to the shifting and multicolor meanings of the book. Private Carlo Reinhart is barely twenty-one years old when he arrives in Berlin, singular, thoughtful, and innocent, a mammoth-sized child of life's ambiguities. He leaves the city on a medical discharge from the "psycho" ward of the Army hospital. As for Berlin itself...

Critics have agreed since Crazy in Berlin that Berger is "one of the finest writers alive," one of the "living greats," one of "a small group of important American writers," but they have been uneasy about defining exactly in what this greatness resides…. What is most immediately evident about Berger is that he is a writer who loves to write (not always the case with writers). He has said that he's at work not to expose or change the world but to provi...

It is a mystery of literary criticism that Thomas Berger, one of the most ambitious, versatile, and entertaining of contemporary novelists, is hardly ever mentioned in the company of America's major writers. He is a wit, a fine caricaturist, and his prose crackles with Rabelaisian vitality. His phenomenal ear for oddnesses of speech appropriates as readily the grey malapropisms of the silent majority in Reinhart in Love ("I know you'll be taking advantage of the G.I. Bill," says ...