Like much American fiction of the 1960s, The Flounder represents a variety of what I would like to call kitchensink modernism: form and control are out the window; anything goes, including the kitchen sink, or, in this case, the kitchen stove. Into his enormous stew of a narrative, Grass stirs large chunks of social history, some fanciful anthropology, travelogues, fairy tales, a virtual cookbook of succulent recipes, mock-romantic pastoral, including some of the great mushroom-hunting passages in recent literature (maybe the only such passages), autobiography, contemporary politics, the whole seasoned with a liberal sprinkling of poems about which the best I can say is that they don't survive translation. The book is so loaded with invention that it lumbers—I was going to say flounders—from "Month" to "Month," under the weight of its exuberance, as if Grass were determined that the feast will not let up, even...