Thomas Berger, 1987. Photograph by William Sauro/The New York Times/Redux.

There are some writers who, for completely arbitrary reasons, pass from a period of renown almost directly into obscurity. The late Thomas Berger, who died last week at the age of eighty-nine, is a classic case: an important novelist easily overlooked in the present day. A cursory glance at his body of work shows that he was not only prolific but also versatile, writing modern retellings of classic genres, from the western (“Little Big Man,” 1964) and noir (“Who is Teddy Villanova?,” 1977) to fantasy (“Regiment of Women,” 1973). He wrote a multi-novel character study in his Reinhart series (starting with “Crazy in Berlin,” in 1958, and ending with “Reinhart’s Women,” in 1981) and even a parody of a parody, with “Adventures of the Artificial Woman,” from 2004, a sort of modern reimagining of “I Dream of Jeannie.” At first glance, his books seem weirdly disparate, which may, in part, account for his being overlooked. In a perfect world, a writer’s ability to throw himself easily into different voices and worlds, his resistance to habit, wouldn’t deter us from appreciating him. Yet Berger isn’t as discussed or studied as his contemporaries who were more experimental (Barthelme, Pynchon) or less (Roth, Updike). Unlike many of his cohort—whom David Foster Wallace called the Great Male Narcissists—Berger was a novelist almost without_ _ego.

The stories that end up defining us are not always the ones that make us think the hardest but the ones that make us the happiest, at least momentarily. This is doubly true for writers, who find themselves indebted to the stories that first showed them that literature could be not only interesting but also comforting. Many writers begin by mimicking their influences, and their ventriloquism eventually gives way to a distinct identity. Berger’s identity, in contrast, lay in his ability to mimic other styles, but the result was never the sort of pure pastiche you might expect. Berger declared that he wrote out of an almost childish love, a love without mockery. “Persons who na_ï_vely mistake me for a merry-andrew with an inflated pig’s bladder can never understand that I adore whichever tradition I am striving to follow,” he said in a 1980 interview. “What results is the best I can manage by way of joyful worship—not the worst in sneering derision.” It’s love that saved his books from being snide—in fact, it’s love that allowed them to be written in the first place. Berger was so devoted to his source material that he was willing to nearly obliterate his own voice in service of it.

Nowhere is this more beautifully realized than in “Arthur Rex,” Berger’s 1978 spin on Arthurian Legend, principally Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur.” Here Berger adopts the distinct voice of the medieval-epic narrator, slipping easily into the rhythm and pattern of courtly speech, with its “And”s and "Now"s and “Whilst”s, its frequent and self-serious references to the glory of God and the sin of doubt. He uses the old style of speech to tell what has always been a surprisingly modern story: that of a kingdom in which every socioeconomic problem is brilliantly resolved and its people turn to a pure and destructive religious idealism. The tone is somewhere between nostalgia and criticism: we watch the flawed utopia of King Arthur’s knights crash down around their heads as Berger’s narrator stands by, relating everything with a sad neutrality.

“Arthur Rex” is plain-speaking on a fantastical subject. Emotional developments are delivered in blunt strokes, and often allowed no more than a sentence. Characters “knew shame”—and inner shifts are signalled by simple, definitive phrases like, “And so he conquered his envy.” The natural vagueness of the style reveals the torrid inner life of Berger’s adopted characters and the strangeness of their rigidly coded world. Profound truths crop up in the middle of sentences, and seem to have no sense of their own importance. “Now any truth concerning love is all but unbearable in the best of times,” Berger’s narrator says at once point, before quickly moving on. There are times, too, when the language gets in the way. (Berger is fond of the word “swyve,” but who wouldn’t be?) But mostly it works to strip away the thick, weedy language of the original, revealing something pure and alive.

In Malory’s somewhat dimensionless characters Berger sees a group of flawed, wounded people, each made individual by his or her own specific sadness. Sir Launcelot is revealed as a morally weak religious obsessive, while Sir Gawaine (of Green Knight fame) is steadily transformed before us, from a carefree womanizer into a student of suffering. Sir Kay the seneschal comes to life as a bitchy pest obsessed with his own sense of inferiority, at last achieving nobility on the battlefield, slaying ten of the enemy “as if they were Cornish pasties.” We are shown the trials of Gareth, a young man who must prove himself in a Monty Pythonesque battle, during which his opponent keeps losing limbs but somehow refuses to stand down. We are shown the pursuits of Percival and Galahad, the sexually inexpert knights whose purity is the thing that makes them perfect, while rendering them totally ridiculous. King Arthur is noble as usual, but he is also undone by his own innocence, while Guinevere is a pragmatist and a cynic “to whom all men were as boys.” The world they live in is one of finite truths and obvious hierarchies: not only does every knight know where he stands on the pecking order but so does everyone else in the kingdom, just as each woman knows how beautiful she is in comparison to every other woman. But these characters are no less pained for their lack of doubt. Certainty doesn’t ever save them; if anything, it leads them into harm.

Their pain, and their methods of handling it, is the point. Berger’s knights are neurotics, outwardly stoic but inwardly chaotic. After a certain point, you almost understand why they run toward disaster at every opportunity: pain becomes the goal of their existence. I can think of few novels that leave a reader feeling so hopeful about human suffering, in which the innocence and religious optimism of the narrator allow you to forget how clearly doomed everyone is. “Arthur Rex” derives its momentum not from the ceaseless forward-moving action of the original tales but from the knights’ crucial aloneness, their desperate need to become absorbed, or absolved, by something else. For the melancholy Tristram, that something else is love; whenever he sees Isolde, the object of his tragic affection, he seeks, as Berger writes, to “eliminate the separation between them.” It’s the same thing that causes Arthur, upon realizing that he has living relatives in Gawaine and his brothers, to reflect aloud, “Tis strange…I had believed I was quite alone in the world.”

The way the statement comes at you, almost out of the blue, is characteristic of Berger’s writing. It’s the thing that links a series of otherwise seemingly unrelated works together. Berger didn’t choose just any genres to work with; he chose genres whose specialty was loneliness. The western, the crime novel, sci-fi: the most modern thing about certain older forms of writing is how hauntingly lonely they can be. Berger doesn’t try to repurpose King Arthur for a new audience but to expose his oddness, and the paradox of a person who “was never historical, but everything he did was true." It’s the sort of thing that only a close and passionate reader would take comfort in. Berger, who in later years went out of his way to shield himself from the outside world, was a person more at home in books than in life.

This is the work of writers, too: to create worlds that never existed but are truer, in their way, than actual life is at its best. There’s pain in that distinction, and a certain clumsiness in recognizing it; Berger understood that, too, and he wasn’t afraid of exposing it by reinventing fictional worlds full of characters who were, in their own, specific ways, too pure to live.

“Arthur Rex” is, at the moment, only available as an e-book, and only since 2013. It’s hard to say whether Berger’s death will bring more of his books back into print, or whether future readers will take to his work as a whole. Let’s hope so: it’s absurd to think that a writer so dedicated to exalting the stories he loved should be denied the same passionate appreciation—the chance to influence in the same way.