In material terms, Berger’s been unflinching in his dedication: twenty-two novels since his 1958 debut, Crazy in Berlin. His shelf, while unified both by his unmistakable gentle irony and his uncanny ear for musical collisions of high and low diction, effloresces in wild diversity: a quasi-Updikean quartet of novels following the life stages of a lumpen, angelic alter ego named Reinhart; a pair of shambolic historical-legendary epics, Little Big Man and Arthur Rex (the former, his best-known novel, now followed by a sequel); and a handful of loving demolitions of genre—the private-eye novel in Who Is Teddy Villanova?, utopian and dystopian fiction in Nowhere and Regiment of Women, fables of wish fulfillment in Being Invisible and Changing the Past. The remainder are harder to pigeonhole or typify, though all develop motifs of power, victimization, and guilt in human affairs, and all exhibit the curious capacity of his fictional situations to shift like a weather vane between farcical misunderstanding and ominous, sadomasochistic abuse. Many, including Meeting Evil, impinge on the material of the crime novel, or policier, though they never reproduce the tone typical of those genres. (Meanwhile, the audience that savors crime in fiction has overlooked Berger, much as the tropical explorers, in the famous Mad magazine cover illustration, are unaware, as they scrutinize the trees, that they are huddled in the concavity of an enormous footprint.)
These less-categorizable novels, with their nominally realist settings and full of human blundering ranging from adultery and murder to badly cooked meals, constitute the strongest argument for Berger’s importance. The sequence I have in mind begins with the monumental Killing Time, Berger’s fourth, which resembles a Jim Thompson novel rewritten by an American Flaubert. An inquiry into a beatific, existentially profound sociopath who regards himself as the enemy of time, it contains the first of a series of portraits of faintly malicious, hugely pragmatic cops. Berger’s fascination with policemen—the guilt they inspire in introspective souls, the morbidity they indulge as a by-product of their mission, the mental ambiguity-filters they necessarily adopt—is matched only by Alfred Hitchcock’s.
Next come Sneaky People, Neighbors, and The Feud. Sneaky People and The Feud are a pair of large-ensemble midwestern urban novels, full of fond reproductions of American vernacular speech in its vanished splendor, full of unsentimental cross-sections of turf mostly abdicated by American novelists after Booth Tarkington. Neighbors (Berger’s favorite among his own books) inaugurates a masterful triumvirate of novels of menace—its companions are The Houseguest and the book you hold in your hands. Each makes a study of what I’d call ambivalent usurpation—uncanny scenarios wherein a terrifying struggle for power emerges from within a banal milieu. Each features a principal provocateur and a principal victim—but Berger is fascinated by the ways in which innocence and reserve are complicit with chaos and impulsivity. He makes a study of the malignancy of charisma, but of the torpor of reflection as well. In the words of Reinhart, “People use us as we ask them to: this is life’s fundamental, and often the only, justice.” This theme of ambivalent usurpation—exchanges of unspecified guilt and obligation between pairs of human “doubles”—resonates with motifs in works by artists as apparently disparate as Dostoyevsky, Harold Pinter, Patricia Highsmith, Orson Welles, and, again, Hitchcock. It’s typical of Berger, however, that once his theme of doubleness has been established, rather than emphasize similarity between characters to a fatuous degree, he instead exercises his fascination with the fact that differing types do exist: However we might become ensnared by another, the lonely fact of self persists.
The paradoxical logic of Berger’s scenes connects him above all to Franz Kafka. Eschewing ostentatiously dreamlike settings, Shadows and Fog–ian Eastern European atmosphere, or diction, Berger engages with Kafka’s influence at a native level, grasping how the elder writer reconstructed fictional time and causality to align it with his emotional and philosophical reservations about human life. Berger’s tone, like Kafka’s, never oversells paranoia or despair. Instead, he explores the fallibility of the human effort to feel justified or consoled in the gaze of any other being, and the absurdity and heartbreak of the disparity between intention and act. The results are never dreamlike. Berger locates that part of our waking life which unfolds in the manner of Zeno’s paradox, where it is possible only to fall agonizingly short in any effort to be understood or to do good. In doing so, he illuminates what it was that necessitated Kafka’s exaggerations. And by splitting the difference halfway back to daylight—and setting his daylit persecutions among strip malls and suburban developments—he unnerves us even more deeply.
Berger offers further pleasures: droll wit, formal slyness, and the diction and vocabulary of a Henry James high on H. L. Mencken. He’s as brilliant a student of American talk as Nabokov or DeLillo, and my favorites among his sentences often pivot on fragments of tabloid squawk elevated into odd majesty by their surrounding syntax. Indeed, to believe Berger’s own (suspect) testimony, language is his only subject. Among his countless eloquent demurrals of discussion of the moral, philosophical, or psychological implications of his work, my favorite is one given to Brooks Landon, Berger’s most essential critic: “I have never believed that I work in the service of secular rationalism (the man of good will, the sensible fellow, the social meliorist who believes the novel holds up a mirror to society, etc.). I am essentially a voyeur of copulating words.”
Those demurrals reflect Berger’s distrust of the shifting ground of language, and his horror of abstractions and false certainties, which preclude nearly any human gesture less immediate than the cooking by one person of a delicious meal for another. All else is laden with presumption at best, grim manipulation at worst: Every person is surely full of purposes, and Berger suspects his own as direly as anyone else’s. (“Remember that you will understand my work best when you are at your most selfish,” he has also told Landon.) The letters that I am so fortunate as to receive from Berger are full of enthusiasms: for character actors like Elisha Cook Jr. and Laird Cregar, for Superman comics, for Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, for the novels of Barbara Pym, Marcel Proust, and Frank Norris, and as well for some but not all of the writers and filmmakers to whom I’ve presumed to compare him. Perhaps the feast of culture is another port in the storm of existence (to mix a metaphor), though Berger’s main characters are never artists or writers, and those few creative types who do appear are usually ogres or bozos, if not both.
Landon has explored Berger’s sustaining relationship to Nietzsche, whose notion of “slave” and “master” personalities presages Berger’s interdependent victims and victimizers. Other critics point to Berger’s engagement with existentialism of the type which was fashionable in postwar culture when he began writing. The murderers in Killing Time and Meeting Evil, so unalike in other ways, both reflect a fascination with existentialist rationales for motiveless murder, à la Crime and Punishment, and Camus’s The Stranger, and Hitchcock’s Rope. What’s clear, too, is that in his novels of menace Berger is compelled by and attracted to his provocateur villains for their dynamism, and for their talent for testing the certainties of everyday life, the rote morals of policemen, etc. And yet, unlike the typical novelists of Berger’s own generation, the Keseys and Kerouacs, and even the Updikes and Roths, the dissident against social complacency is never Berger’s hero. What Berger resists in social rebellion is its resemblance to what it attacks: its self-validating smugness, its readiness to manipulate in its own cause, its cobbled-together moral jargon, its bottom-line disinterest in the mystery of daily existence, its poor listening skills.
Berger isn’t an experimental writer in any of the usual senses of the word. But in his ferocious devotion to paradox and irony as investigatory tools, his fiction consists of an endless, irresolvable experiment into what can be translated out of the morass of lived human days into useful and entertaining stories—though Berger would likely argue that no story can be useful, and then jibe that no one was meant to be entertained beyond himself. B
erger’s uncertainty is his being and his implement. The uniquely vertiginous nature of a page of his fiction is testament to the daily experiment of his art.
In the Bergerian world, masks are often peeled away to reveal further masks, yet just as often what was mistaken for a mask turns out to be a face. No irony is conclusive enough not to give way to a deeper irony, and the deepest of all is the realization that first impressions are sometimes adequate, or that it is the rare quandary that is actually improved by sustained pondering. Fate is for the embracing: As a Berger policeman once wisely remarked, “Death can happen to anyone.” No one, however grotesque or ill-mannered, is so remote from the human predicament that he is ineligible for the occasional epiphanic insight, yet no one, however saintly or patient, is likely to be able to make use of the insights at hand in the flurry of a practical transaction involving another person. Just when Bergerian loneliness seems ubiquitous, contact is unexpectedly made, and though Berger’s sex scenes are often barren and harsh, his tender evocations of romantic yearning may be the least-appreciated aspect of his books. No grace can ever be earned, in Berger’s world, but it does fall like precious rain here and there.
Meeting Evil is on the unmerciful side of his shelf, but odd, sunny moments break through—it wouldn’t be Berger otherwise. It’s also spare, in the manner of his late books (apart from the Little Big Man sequel). The structure, hard to discern on the first roller-coaster plunge through, is elegant and ironclad: In the first section John Felton is persecuted and harassed by the police, by bystanders, and by his wife; in the third section, he is abandoned by all of them. Richie’s incursion is the only consistent note in his reality, and it is one of purest mayhem; the only person responsive to John is a madman. Between, in the book’s second section, Berger delves into Richie’s self-justifying viewpoint, in pages as lean and shocking as an X-ray of the brain of a shark. In those, we learn that the madman listens to John for the simplest reason: He likes him.
Berger is now seventy-eight years old. It’s a rare privilege to witness a great novelist’s arc beyond such an age, but Berger is unflagging, and it may not be too much to wish for several more novels. The recent books are gentler, more forgiving, and often serve as consolidations of earlier sequences: Orrie’s Story returned to the midwestern panoramas of Sneaky People and The Feud; the overlooked Suspects revisits the sincere and troubled policemen of Killing Time while excusing them from the duty of confronting an existential superman. And just as the fourth Reinhart novel, Reinhart’s Women, sheltered that beset character from the historical strife of the first three books, his newest, Best Friends, may be seen as a gentle capstone to the three novels of menace which include Meeting Evil. In it, the twinned characters, usurper and usurpee (can you tell them apart?), meet not as strangers but as lifelong friends who uncover the strangeness hidden inside familiarity. But it is also a pining love story, and another Kafkaesque parable of shifting perspective, and more: Berger has insisted that Best Friends felt to him, in the writing, like nothing he’d ever done. As a novelist this brings my heart into my throat. I only hope that at his age I’ll be not only working but working, in Berger’s manner, without presumptions, without a safety net constructed of the good reviews gathered over a lifetime. Each time Berger writes he ventures out with only his style for courage.
As a favor to my friend I’ve avoided the word which has dogged his years on this planet: I have not called him comic. But I would fail here if I didn’t report that his books have made me laugh harder, over my years on the planet, than any others on my shelves. I predict that you will laugh, too, and that you will find, as I have, that this laughter sustains itself even after the contemplation, inevitable after absorbing more than one or two of Berger’s books, of the vast distress at the human plight that necessitated their writing. Berger isn’t comic. He, like life, is merely, and hugely, fucking funny.
—Introduction for Meeting Evil, and The Village Voice, 2003
Rushmore Versus Abundance
Your true task, as a son, is to reproduce every one of the enormities touched upon in this manual, but in attenuated form … choose one of your most honored beliefs, such as the belief that your honors and awards have something to do with you, and abjure it … Fatherhood can be, if not conquered, at least “turned down” in this generation—by the combined efforts of all of us together.
—DONALD BARTHELME, “A Manual for Sons”
Grooming this chapter, I spotted myself wielding the formulation “one of America’s three or four greatest living novelists” in the Berger piece, and the phrase “unceasing tide of new titles” in discussing Paula Fox’s republication.
If these are received terms (and they are), what’s being received? And who’s on the receiving end?
Here’s Mailer’s worst legacy: the degree to which he reified the notion of a Rushmore frieze of “greatness,” proceeding through Hemingway to himself. Not content to announce White Elephant Triumph as the only possible redemption for the claims of his ego, he declared it as the standard for a generation. Mailer-Bellow-Updike-Roth-ism was our reward. The paradigm, though discredited, inane, unwieldy, and obnoxious, is still fitted over the current life of literary culture at the drop of a certain type of long and moderately successful novel into the conversation. Let that book take a large prize, or be a best seller for a month or two, and Rushmore’s under construction again—only who’ll play Lincoln, Jefferson, and Roosevelt?
Rushmore is a founding-father dream, a religious myth, and worse: It’s a lid on not-thinking. Screw Rushmore. Dismantle the graven image, Hemingway-Faulkner-Fitzgerald-Steinbeck begat Bellow-Mailer-Updike-Roth who begat the counterculture Rushmore of Heller-Kesey-Pynchon-Vonnegut who begat the shrinking-readership Rushmore of DeLillo-Coover-Barth who begat the humiliating post-stature-edition-and-just-pick-any-four-depending-on-who’s-hot of Wallace-Moody-Chabon-Franzen-Eugenidies-Powers-Vollman-or-even-sometimes-Lethem. (Dismantle it from inside, oh you my brothers! They only project our features on that stone to mock us for how deficient we appear there!)
The crime of Literary Rushmore, the one that anyone notices first, is that which ought to dissolve Rushmore forever in a bath of shame, but never does: The stone heads are white American men. There’s never a Cather or Ellison or Baldwin or Oates or Ozick or Morrison on that mountain, no matter how unmistakably said person may have knocked one out of the ballpark that particular year, or decade, or century. There’s the sole evidence you’d ever need that the Rushmore construction is ritual authoritarian enactment, not a description of any engaged reader’s, or writer’s, context. Such groupings consist not of an argument but of an incantation of power.
Coming of age as a reader, I took an instinctive, cool-hunter’s pleasure in defying the Rushmores presented to me: Speak, to sixteen-year-old Lethem, the names “Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov” and he’d spit back “Clifford Simak”; to the twenty-six-year-old bookstore brat, try “Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner” and he’d reply “Nathanael West” or, to “Coover, Barth, etc.,” “Gilbert Sorrentino.” (An echo of my fetish for identifying Fifth Beatles.) At the peak of Mailer-Roth-Bellow-Updike dominance, it seemed incredible to care about the novel and not also be reading James Salter and Robert Stone and Richard Yates. In the same spirit, when I called someone like Berger “one of America’s three or four greatest living novelists” I’d add (usually in my head, less often aloud) “with Steven Millhauser and Steve Erickson and Stephen Dixon.”
And all of that, let me be the first to point out, is only to speak of other white American men (so many of them named Steve). If you actually open the menu of twentieth-century writing, as anyone with a real appetite must inevitably do, the idiocy of exclusion moves beyond the ethical crime of rendering other “discourses” invisible: It’s aesthetic starvation. As a teenager I knew, with a defiance that resembled an identity politics, that Chandler, Highsmith, Dick, Delany, and Shirley Jackson had more to give than much of what I’d find on the library’s respectable fron
t shelves. Soon after, small-press brain explosions included Michael Brodsky and Harry Mathews, the equivalent of a Marvel Comics reader’s discovery of the existence of R. Crumb and Gary Panter. Iris Murdoch, Dawn Powell, Ann Beattie, Katherine Dunn, and Christina Stead were thunderbolts of my catching-up-to-women in my twenties and thirties. This happened not through self-policing for a respectable show of diversity but from readerly hunger. At the risk of being obnoxious, it always struck me that literacy consisted precisely of this: having off-center preferences derived from a termite’s reading plan.
James Baldwin’s Another Country was the compass through my own racial-familial mire in The Fortress of Solitude, but nobody apart from me mentioned Baldwin’s name, even after I begged. Rushmore writers were the only comparisons bestowed, apparently, even if just to say I hadn’t clobbered my way, Mailerishly, into their bracket. Insidious, wearisome Rushmore ritual informs the white male American novelist, in interview upon interview, that he needs to think only about other white male American novelists, a bunch of his contemporaries who are—if he’s lucky—constantly being asked about him.
The Ecstasy of Influence Page 40