Meeting Evil

“The author creates a world in this book that is so corrupt, so consistently vicious, that innocence can glow visibly within his misunderstood protagonist. The plot gets nicely complicated… and the entire contraption claps together in a great, unpredictable, satisfying calamity.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“Spare, meticulous prose… sharply evocative of human weakness and rage.”

—
The Washington Post

“Thomas Berger is a writer of enormous wit and incisive wisdom.”

—
San Francisco Review of Books

“Thomas Berger is a magician… he never hits a false note. The effect is as if a snapshot has suddenly come to life, as we experience the sights and sounds and smells of that time and that place.”

—
Detroit Free Press

“An exquisitely subtle artist who can conjure character and emotion from the slightest verbal means.”

—
The New Republic

“At his best… Thomas Berger can command attention solely as a lonely, insidious voice insisting… that fiction can be stranger than truth.”

—
Time

“Thomas Berger is one of America’s most original novelists.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“Thomas Berger is a magnificent novelist.”

—
National Review

“Berger properly belongs up there with the living greats, with Burgess, Nabokov, and three or four others.”

—
The Cincinnati Enquirer

“One of America’s most important comic artists.”

—
The Boston Globe

“A cutting, ironic wit and a precision of detail so deadly it hurts when you laugh.”

—
Ms.

“Humbling, eye-opening, and enormously funny.”

—
Newsweek

Arthur Rex
Being Invisible
Best Friends
Changing the Past
The Feud
The Houseguest
Killing Time
Little Big Man
Neighbors
Nowhere
Orrie’s Story
Regiment of Women
The Return of Little Big Man
Robert Crews
Sneaky People
Suspects
Who Is Teddy Villanova?

THE REINHART SERIES
Crazy in Berlin
Reinhart in Love
Vital Parts
Reinhart’s Women

R
IVERHEAD
B
OOKS
, N
EW
Y
ORK

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

IS there any stronger evidence of the anhedonia of our reading culture than that Thomas Berger’s novels don’t flood airport bookstalls? There is simply no better way to destroy an hour or three. Before anything else let me say that here, reader, you are in for a treat. I envy you your first encounter, if that is what it is, with
Meeting Evil,
or with Berger’s oeuvre per se (and, yes, this is a fine place to start). This book is one of Berger’s most relentless and ingenious fictional “contraptions,” as a praiseful reviewer once dubbed it, and now that it is in your hands—turn to chapter one and be shanghaied—it truly needs, as they say, no further introduction.

I’ll give it one anyway. I’m grateful for the chance to shout that Thomas Berger is one of America’s three or four greatest living novelists. I emphasize
novelist,
for Berger’s greatness resides in the depth and extensiveness of his commitment to and exploration of his chosen form. I can think of no other American writer more invested in and trusting of the means and materials of
fiction qua fiction:
scenes and sentences, chapters and paragraphs, and, above all, characters—their voices and introspections, their predicaments in fictional worlds. He’s cultivated this investment to the exclusion of all forms of topicality or sociology, autobiographical appeals to
readerly interest, superficial “innovations,” or controversialism. Berger’s too interested in the mysteries of narrative to bother with metafiction, yet his world does possess a certain rubbery pleasure in its own artifice. He doesn’t bother to disguise fiction’s proscenium arch—his “realism,” such as it is, resides in his assiduous scrutiny of daily existence, at levels both psychological and ontological. Berger adores novels too much to play at their destruction or to be embarrassed at his participation in a tradition.

Berger’s commitment has another aspect: apart from a scattering of short plays and stories, he’s devoted himself entirely to the novel and eschewed side work like journalism, screen-writing, or teaching. Nor has he spent his capital pontificating, issuing manifestos, attending conferences, or granting more than a small handful of interviews. What this may have cost him in terms of journalistic ink, who knows? I won’t speak glibly of “neglect,” though he certainly sells fewer books than do those writers I regard as his only peers, and, though not obscure, is less widely known. A few years ago I made the mistake, in writing an entry on Berger for a literary encyclopedia, of claiming that he’d fallen from a “critical and popular heyday” in the 1960s. Berger wrote me to gently correct my error, explaining that he’d never had a “heyday,” dragging out the sales figures to prove it. No, Berger’s hovered for fifty years in a middle distance, proof neither of the proposition that genius is always rewarded nor that it is universally overlooked. The paradoxical fate of a writer impossible to revive because he’s never been sufficiently neglected is somehow quite suitably Bergerian.

That said, it’s impossible for others not to rage on Berger’s behalf for a larger share of attention and rewards. Take the words of the Pakistani-Texan novelist Zulfikar Ghose: “Novels whose subject matter is their greatest appeal are invariably vastly popular.… Novels which stand on their style alone win
readers slowly, in little bands here and there, until the work becomes one of the layers which compose human consciousness. [This] explains why, among American novelists, Saul Bellow, who knows what to write about, is preferred to Thomas Berger, who knows how to write.… Berger is a novelist and nothing else.… Twenty or thirty years from now Bellow will be one of those obscure funny names one sees who were mistakenly awarded the Nobel Prize, like Pearl Buck, and Berger will be read seriously, like Henry James.”

In material terms, Berger’s been unflinching in his dedication: twenty-two novels since his 1958 debut,
Crazy in Berlin.
His shelf of work, 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,
and fables of wish fulfillment in
Being Invisible
and
Changing the Past.

The virtuosic novelty of those enterprises may sometimes distract readers and commentators from the core concerns of the majority of Berger’s novels. The remainder of his books are harder to pigeonhole or typify—though all of them develop motifs of power, victimization, and guilt in human affairs, and all exhibit the curious capacity of his fictional situations to shift like a weathervane 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 categorizeable novels, with their nominally realist settings, and full of human blundering ranging from adultery and murder to badly cooked meals, comprise the strongest argument for Berger’s lasting importance, especially cumulatively. The sequence I have in mind begins with the monumental
Killing Time,
Berger’s fourth novel, which I’ve described elsewhere as “Jim Thomson rewritten by an American Flaubert.” That book, an inquiry into a beatific, existentially profound sociopath who regards himself as the enemy of time, contains as well 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, partly for what he describes as the effortlessness of its composition) inaugurates a masterful triumvirate of novels of menace—its companions are
The Houseguest
and the book you now hold in your hands. Each of these three books is theatrical, tightly unified in time (and in the case of the two novels before
Meeting Evil,
in place as well). Each make 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, yes, again, Hitchcock. It is typical of Berger 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.