On “Little Big Man” by Thomas Berger ****

I'm not sure how to take much of this book. I read that it was a parody of westerns, and I suppose one could read it that way, but it wasn't particularly spoofy. I read that it was a picaresque novel, and it is at some level like that—a story in episodes with various parts pulled in from almost every western trope you could imagine. I read that it is a western from the point of view of the Native peoples on the other side, and it does that to an extent, but not really. It's just its own weird book, one that gave me some pause especially early on. It opens with a preface by a supposed expert, the man who gathered the tales from Jack Crabb, a 112-year-old man who lived in the Old West. The preface is hilarious, full of faux learnedness and silly asides. And so I was expecting something similar of the book—but not so. The book seemed much more serious, even in its rendition of tall tale after tall tale. Further, the portrayal of the Native Americans seems problematic, at once cliché, overly positive and overly negative—but I suppose that that is Berger's point in such a portrayal: we never do fully understand them.

The tale starts when Crabb was a kid whose family is slaughtered by the Indians on a journey out west. He's taken captive and raised as a Native American—a Cheyenne—for about five years. In the process, he becomes something of a warrior, killing one man and saving the village—and specifically a frenemy named Little Bear. For this, Crabb is given the name Little Big Man. Eventually, in a fight with whites, Crabb finds himself in danger of being killed, so he ditches the Cheyenne garb and identity and now again becomes white.

As such, he's put into a preacher's family—really just the preacher and his wife—and raised proper for a short while, but the high living and moralizing doesn't suit him well, so eventually he runs away.

He ends up back with the Cheyenne somehow at some point—actually, at various points—so without rereading, it's exactly to recall what happens when. He does a stint as a businessman, gets ripped off, dallies among the Cheyenne some more. He gets married to a Swedish gal, gets himself mixed up with some bandits, meets Wyatt Earp, is again clobbered by Indians, to whom he loses his wife and kid. He becomes a drunkard, goes searching for gold, befriends a Cheyenne gal and son and marries the gal, and takes up life as a Cheyenne again, having another son by her. Then Custer wipes out his Indian family and he vows revenge. But instead of that, he gets mixed up with his long lost sister (actually, this happens more than once as well), and meets Wild Bill Hickock, who teaches him how to be a marksman, even as they play poker night after night. Meanwhile, he rescues a gal from prostitution. Eventually, Crabb meets up with Custer again and somehow ends up in Custer's calvary, but his desire for revenge has long since died. This takes him to Little Big Horn, where he once again meets his Indian family. In other words, Crabb is a Forest Gump of the western, somehow ending up in every part of history during a certain set of years. Are we to take him seriously? Even the learned scholar responsible for recording the story doesn't know, but it's an intriguing yarn.