Böll is remarkably popular among older German readers: his fiction combines a sharply localized, vivid sort of reporting with that mixture of involvement and spectatorial reserve with which the experiences of the past twenty-five years are viewed by many Germans who have remained emotionally entangled in their aftermath. He is himself—now at 48—not quite one of the "younger" Germans, who view the Nazi decade with far less immediate concern than their elders, and who are anxious to judge the present from a detached, cosmopolitan point of view. To these more independent younger readers Böll has sometimes seemed provincial in attitude and old-fashioned in his technique; they have not, of course, been indifferent to the integrity and seriousness of Böll's moral position, but they have been troubled by his reluctance—or perhaps his inability—to bring the radical resources of modern fiction to bear upon...