That Thomas Berger's name and books are not mentioned more often--or, seemingly, at all--is a mark of shame on the literary scene. He's such a great writer. I've been reading his stuff for years and was in the middle of rereading Sneaky People when I read of his death in 2014. I had corresponded with him many times and he always returned wonderful and long letters about his work--and also asking me about mine.

But enough about me. Killing Time is a novel that gets exponentially better every twenty pages. It's Berger's pastiche of true-crime (parts read like The Executioner's Song), philosophy lecture (parts read like the Apology), police procedural (parts read like Ed McBain's 87th precinct series). But it never devolves into parody for the sake of a laugh. Berger's theme--how can one fight the progress of time?--is serous. What's great is that the conversations between Detweiler, the killer, and other characters never solve the issue because you can't solve it. You can only talk about it.

The book is also filled with Berger's trademark asides and authorial finesse. Here's one sample, when a lawyer, is being strangled:

Melrose had never been seized by the throat his life long. He had not engaged in physical violence since boyhood, and then, undersized, he did not favor it as a mode of intercourse with his fellow creatures, as he had implied in the story he told Detweiler on their first meeting. Later he had fleshed out, but from his early twenties onward he had rarely taken any exercise worth the name. He habitually ate rich foods and drank hearty wines. In the bathtub he was not as sleek as when buttoned into his English suits. He was quite corpulent, his blood pressure ran high, and any quickening of foot pace cost him effort in breath. He had never received instruction and techniques of self-defense. Added to these disadvantages, his present role is victim of an attack was an absolute reversal of values to him and hence severely shocking; his profession was to be above the battle.

There are dozens of passages like this and more seemingly throwaway asides, as when a detective is looking in a shop window for a Christmas gift: "His son had asked for a basketball, but Tierney resented being told what to buy. It was alien to the spirit of Christmas." Or when Berger notes of an attorney, "He was a lawyer, trained to not show his feelings except as a device." Or when he depicts a character's thoughts about her husband: "Betty's trouble had always been that when she found a man with whom she felt intellectual affinity, he did not appeal to her physically, and vice-versa. She could hardly bear to be alone in Arthur's presence unless he was pawing her." These are the kinds of sentences, always elegant, that knock me out when I read Berger at his best.

I reread it for the first time in twenty years and it stands up well. Time hasn't touched this one. ( )

In this spin on the police procedural sub-genre, two policemen, two reporters, and, to a lesser degree, a number of bereaved family members set out in physical and psychological pursuit of a murderer. This is no whodunit: the murderer is revealed early on, and thereafter the novel concerns itself with exploring oddities within the thoughts and behavior of all these people, and, especially, their engagements with the murderer, who is fond of raising philosophical questions about such matters as time, society, the legal system, and society versus the individual. The book is witty, playful yet thoughtful, and the characters are quite engaging. The philosophizing is mildly interesting, but only to a point. Hence the book's great flaw: it's too long by half and its facets are poorly integrated, The first half contains almost no philosophy, and the second half almost no plot. If stirred better and unburdened of a couple of dead-end subplots and about a hundred pages, this would have been a more pleasant read. ( )

Funny and very good up until Detweiler's capture--after that slow, ponderous, and philosophic ( )