In his commitment to a dialectic view of reality [John Berger] involves the reader in a scrupulous working out of interlocking contradictions, rather than in ritual affirmations of dissent. His views on art, his original field and the one in which he is most expert, run so much against the grain of current dogma that they are more often sneered at than confronted; his novels are too densely cerebral and schematic to be easily digested; his social criticism is too idiosyncratic to offer much comfort to orthodox Marxists, while at the same time it offends the dominant mood of liberal expediency in the West. Yet, fashionable or not, his 11 books make a strong claim to represent, for the post-war period, the broadest and most cogent expression in English of the socialist imagination. (p. 20)

Paul Delany, "John Berger's Socialist Imagination," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1976 by The...