It is a mystery of literary criticism that Thomas Berger, one of the most ambitious, versatile, and entertaining of contemporary novelists, is hardly ever mentioned in the company of America's major writers. He is a wit, a fine caricaturist, and his prose crackles with Rabelaisian vitality. His phenomenal ear for oddnesses of speech appropriates as readily the grey malapropisms of the silent majority in Reinhart in Love ("I know you'll be taking advantage of the G.I. Bill," says the hero's dad, "full tuition paid and in addition this generous emollient per the month of expenses. A wonderful opportunity, and one never before vouchfaced to the American veteran.") as the winning tall-tale garrulousness of Little Big Man, a savory reminiscence of the Cheyenne Indians in frontier days.

Crazy in Berlin, the first of Berger's 10 novels, ushers us into the jumbled, seedy, conspiratorial atmosphere of the divided German capital after World War II, and no work of American fiction or reportage about that place and period carries a greater feeling of authenticity. But the special Berger touch is his seesaw from the grim chaotic backdrop to the high spirits of the susceptible young hero, Carlo Reinhart…. When it comes to impressing critics and readers, [Berger] may have been vanquished (with the exception of the best-selling Little Big Man, which appeared at a time when Indian grievances had caught hold of the popular imagination) by his own many-sidedness, his refusal to rest his finger on the self-righteous pulse of the nation.

Moreover, it cannot be said that he ever writes from a universal, or even an ordinary eye-level perspective. He is a magic realist and … Berger's focus, his grasp of detail, is sharper and smaller than life. He will allow something infinitesimal to catch his eye and brood upon it, even as he overlooks a larger emotion or design. In the past the disturbing effect of this was somewhat offset by the sheer cascade into his bulky novels of tangy physical images, raunchy episodes, and eccentric wayside characters with an extravagant gift of gab. In his new book, Neighbors, there are no such fringe benefits. This strange exasperating little story has been pared down to the taunting colloquy among four characters on a dead-end street in an unnamed suburb. We see them through a pane that is blindingly clear and yet so distorting as to make them seem demented. (pp. 34-5)

[Berger is] terrifyingly methodical and consciously satanic in his psychological chiller whose hero is victimized mainly by his own weakness and ambivalence. The plot dramatizes a conviction Berger has held for a long time. In the fictional foreword to Little Big Man, the narrator observes: "Each of us, no matter how humble, from day to day finds himself in situations in which he has the choice of acting either heroically or craven." Is Berger telling us in Neighbors that cravenness, uncertainty about our own feelings, breeds aggression in others? That obsequiousness is really distrust, and once suspected will be returned in kind? Neighbors is a cool study in taking advantage, a chess game in which each move is followed inexorably by the countermove the player leaves himself open for. The victim is at the mercy of some force not larger than himself as happens in Kafka's The Trial but, far more grueling, exactly equal to himself. That is to say, everyone gets his just psychological desserts.

If that is what the author means, the lesson, though suspenseful, is no lark for the reader…. Unfortunately, nothing is quite so detrimental to well-being or good reading as such a dogged delivery of insights. In other stories of persecution—Saul Bellow's The Victim, Bernard Malamud's "The Last Mohican," even Nabokov's far more iniquitous Laughter in the Dark—it is our acceptance of the moral and the motive that makes the torment bearable. But Neighbors demands our attention entirely for the tactics of the game.

Berger intends also to make a larger social comment, showing us Everyman (Enid, Earl), or at any rate conventional Middle America, poignantly tempted by the footloose, resourceful, aging beatniks, Harry and Ramona. "This is quite exciting, really," observes Earl to his wife. "It took all these things to happen for a whole new vista to open up before us." The speed with which the vista snaps shut reminds us that Berger has never, even in his more rollicking inventions, seen the world in a kindly light…. We are being warned, in this latest and sparest of Berger's fictions, that we cannot count on the better side of man. (p. 35)