With the deserved success of his third novel, Little Big Man (1964), Thomas Berger, who has died aged 89, was propelled to the forefront of American novelists. Berger was destined never to match that popular acclaim, despite producing another 20 novels of fine quality. He jumped between genres, and tones, but as an observer of the black comedy of American life his work bore comparison with figures as disparate as Mark Twain and Franz Kafka.
Little Big Man was that rare phenomenon: a bestseller that almost immediately entered the academic syllabus. I was assigned it in an American Studies seminar in 1970, the year Arthur Penn's film, starring Dustin Hoffman, was released. The book is a reminiscence by one Jack Crabb, aged 111, who was adopted by the Cheyenne as a child and renamed Little Big Man. Crabb claims to be the only white survivor of Custer's Last Stand, and tells of encounters with virtually every legendary character of the Old West. As a huge historical picaresque novel it recalls John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, but its tall-tale humour speaks of Twain, or Herman Melville's Confidence Man, while the deconstruction of American myths, a decade before Gore Vidal's Burr, catches perfectly the tenor of the changing times.
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