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 provide himself with an alternative; he writes for the sake of creation. We can trace his trying out, with obviously exuberant relish, the possibilities of his craft, of that amorphous something called prose narrative: Fantasy parable in Regiment of Women, the science fiction of a futuristic society in which traditional sex roles are reversed—with no better results. The genre of the police novel in Killing...