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 Time with its flat sharp sheen: in it the crime and punishment of an insane (or deific) murderer are presented with the detachment of the lens on a film noir camera. The chivalric romance of Arthur Rex, his twentieth-century adaptation of the Camelot legend—as Tennyson's Idylls of the King is the nineteenth-century adaptation. The American epic of Little Big Man (our Indian wars are our Iliad) with its ironic eiron of a narrator in the great national vein of Twain.
The critical line on Berger has always been that he is a satirist with a keen sense of the ludicrous who offers us a "bleakly comic account of the world's malevolent absurdity" (Kenneth Graham). When faulted, it is generally by critics who think him nihilistic, or see his cleverness as flippancy. "He cannot resist drawing almost anything he happens to know into the circle of his ridicule." This charge by Leslie Fiedler, that Berger is a joker without "moral earnestness," is utterly false, but it underlies the not infrequent and equally false conclusion that Arthur Rex and Little Big Man are parodies of their subject matter. Berger has written only one parody, the irrepressible spoof of the Hammett/Chandler private-eye whodunit, Who Is Teddy Villanova?, which plays with language as merrily as Mozart played with notes.
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