Thomas Berger's fifth novel ["Who Is Teddy Villanova?"] is mainly a parody of detective thrillers; his well-known "Little Big Man" was a parody of Westerns. According to the jacket copy, in "Who Is Teddy Villanova?" we will recognize the familiar "seedy office," "down-at-the-heels shamus," "procession of sinister, chicane, or merely brutal men and scheming, vicious, but lovely women" and a "sequence of savage beatings." All this is true. The novel contains much that is conventional in detective thrillers. Still, one needn't know the books of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler in order to appreciate Berger's witty burlesque of their characters and situations.

Berger's style, which is one of the great pleasures of the book, is something like S. J. Perelman's—educated, complicated, graceful, silly, destructive in spirit, and brilliant—and it is also something like Mad Comics—densely, sensuously detailed, unpredictable, packed with gags. Beyond all this, it makes an impression of scholarship—that is, Berger seems really to know what he jokes about. This includes not only Hammett and Chandler, but also Racine, Goethe, Ruskin, Elias Canetti, New York and the way its residents behave. Essentially, then, Berger's style is like itself insofar as it is like other styles. And his whole novel—in its wide ranging reference to cultural forms both high and pop—is like a huge verbal mirror. Its reflections are similar to what we see in much contemporary literature—hilarious and serious at once. (p. 1)

On some occasions in the novel, the vulgar material slightly overwhelms Berger's wit, but this is inevitable. The book deals with certain well-known and oppressive banalities; now and then it must descend to mere seriousness.

Before looking at a particular instance, it should be said that Berger's detective hustles about Manhattan from one highly offensive personal experience to another, and this is a little reminiscent of the plot of another novel, Saul Bellow's "detective novel," "Mr. Sammler's Planet." Mr. Sammler, like Berger's detective Russel Wren, is a literate anachronism, a hero who reads books and, by his very nature, too much suffers the life of the mind. (p. 25)

Both novelists also notice murderous violence, Manhattan's dog-zoo of excremental streets, ubiquitous and matter-of-fact sexual perversity, and other features in the gruesome apocalypse of New York. Naturally both novelists make their theme the staggering insufficiency of an educated intelligence to such modern circumstances. Berger's detective, while investigating the mystery in this novel, stops to analyze events and clues. He is meticulous and exceedingly logical. As a result, he never understands anything until, at last, everything is merely explained to him by the master criminal who then blithely gets away….

As for the mystery itself—the thing this book is about—it seems to lie exactly in Russel Wren's own literary head, his only office, the place where he lives and works. It is a place full of words, but it can neither effectively communicate with the world nor understand its deeply criminal nature. If the novel is hilarious, it is also sometimes a little sad in the sweet, strangely amazing way of Charlie Chaplin….

Still, the novel has an important connection with life, because aside from the pleasure you take in reading it, you will have the wonderful pleasure of reading parts of it aloud to friends and watching the effects in their faces. Terrific comedians always make us "die laughing." Given the alternatives today, we should be grateful. (p. 26)