A review by heyhawk
Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

4.0

This is not "the very best novel every about American west" as the NYT claimed (years after they first panned it), but it did pave the way for some contenders like True Grit by Charles Portis, Lonesome Dove by McMurtry or take your pick from Cormac McCarthy's work (I'm partial to Blood Meridian, The Crossing and No Country for Old Men). It was meant to puncture the myth of the west, and it does that to an certain extent, though as McMurtry says in his intro to the 50th anniversary edition, myths have a way of coming through unscathed. It works as a straightforward tall tale (hence all the Mark Twain comparisons), but it also works as a con job, which I take to be Berger's point about the romanticized west. The introduction and postscript by "a man of letters" are portraits of gullibility, and almost as funny as the main body of the text. Recommended (but read some McMurtry, McCarthy, Portis or Elmore Leonard first, not necessarily in that order).

Maybe my favorite quotation from the book (though there were many contenders): "I wasn't long in discovering it is a rare person in the white world who wants to hear what the other fella says. All the more so when the other fella really knows what he is talking about."