Killing time : a novel

Joe Detweilor is a strange one: he believes life is time; by taking a life you are only stopping time - but it (time) continues in the killer. Detweilor kills three people, but hardly even recognizes the fact because time has continued afterward. Is he crazy? Berger makes him believable, even worth going along with - for a while, anyway. Some of it gets a bit draggy, but Berger's masterly use of the language is in full force here; he's a pleasure to read.

As different from the author's best known work, The Little Big Man, as that novel is from another comic masterpiece of his, Reinhart in Love, which was completely different from Arthur Rex, Berger's gleeful subversion of the historical novel, which is .... If I were one of those vitamin-deficient, pellagra-ridden geeks who believe in conspiracy theories, I'd believe that there is one, and has been for 35 years, to keep this author down. If this author's books aren't forthwith reprinted, someone ought to die. The body of his work is so rich and varied, in style and subject matter, that he makes Updike seem like the schoolmarmish fuddy duddy he essentially is and Roth the sophomoric he would like to be. Killing Time (now, get this) is about a lovable killer, a man who kills certain people because he felt sorry for them. Yes, Joe Detweiler seems to be a mystic, but at the same time he seems very much a down to earth naif who only wants to become one with the universe (that's why he like to have his penis amputated). Along the way to the transcendent awakening he so devoutly seeks, Joe befriends and mystifies the detective who is trying to solve the murder case, Tierney, the woman who Tierney is having an affair with, who is the sister and daughter of the victims, and (not least) the attorney Melrose, who thinks he has it altogether and who wants to save the childlike Detweiler from himself and an world that just won't understand Detweiler, even though Detweiler thinks his reasons for what he did are so obvious they should go without saying (he himself had forgotten he had committed the murders). And that's just a glib from-the-hip abstract of this highly original novel.

The most serious crime involved in Thomas Berger's "Killing Time" is that the book is out of print. The author lets you know early on who committed the triple murder that's discovered in the opening pages. The joys of the book are the why, the personality of the killer, how it ends, and the kinky truths in the lives of the other characters, major and minor, who Berger creates with a reality, a wit and a way with words that are, simply, tops. Hunt down a copy, read it, and cajole the publisher to reissue this classic