There are ropewalkers, lion tamers, and clowns among novelists; also bareback riders, trapeze artists, strong men, and illusionists; and once in awhile an impresario will appear who commands a whole circus, as Günter Grass did a few years ago with The Flounder, the three-ring, cymbal-clashing, sawdust-kicking entertainment he gave himself as a fiftieth birthday present. Headbirths is a much more modest performance, a mere juggling act—but let that "mere" not imply any disparagement of the art of juggling, or of Günter Grass's command of it. Anyone who can keep two approximately equal handfuls of real-life and fictional characters smoothly circulating and even conversing in the same narrative space, without giving any impression of artificiality, has earned my respect; and Grass throws in at least a dozen other items of widely disparate bulk and shape—the Christian Democratic and the Social Democratic parties of Germany, for...