Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Crazy in Berlin | 1958 | Thomas Berger | Buy |
| 2 | Reinhart in Love | 1962 | Thomas Berger | Buy |
| 3 | Vital Parts | 1971 | Thomas Berger | Buy |
| 4 | Reinhart’s Women | 1981 | Thomas Berger | Buy |
The Reinhart series tracks the life of Carlo Reinhart across four novels and four decades. Crazy in Berlin introduces him as a young soldier in occupied Germany after World War II, struggling to make sense of the rubble around him. Reinhart in Love follows him home to America, where civilian life proves just as baffling. Vital Parts finds him in middle age, overweight and adrift. Reinhart’s Women brings the story into the 1980s, where Reinhart has been abandoned by his wife and must reinvent himself.
Berger uses Reinhart as a vehicle for examining American life from the 1940s through the 1980s. Each novel catches a different era’s anxieties and pretensions, filtered through a character who wants to be a good man but keeps getting outmaneuvered by circumstances and people who are more ruthless or more adaptable than he is. The series is funny in a painful way, and Berger’s prose stays sharp across all four entries.