Volume 3, Number 9 · December 17, 1964
O'Hara and Others
By Stanley Kauffmann
Little Big Man
by Thomas Berger
Dial, 437 pp., $5.95
The Horse Knows the Way
by John O'Hara
Random House, 429 pp., $5.95
With Shuddering Fall
by Joyce Carol Oates
Vanguard, 316 pp., $4.95
The American tall tale, according to Constance Rourke, dates from about the third quarter of the eighteenth century and side-winds its way through Washington Irving and Mark Twain well into the twentieth century. A chief function of the tall tale is as free-flowing conduit of history, a catch-all vehicle that, by disregarding most probabilities and some possibilities, contains a lot of historical truth. Usually these flavor the adventure of an Odyssean hero, as in Vincent McHugh's unjustly neglected Caleb Catlum's America. Now Thomas Berger, the author of two novels about a G.I. in and after the Army, Crazy in Berlin and Reinhart in Love, has shifted from the present to write one of these calico chronicles of the past.
Review, 1655 words
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