[Johnson's] methods of exploring and integrating a narrative so defy conventional realistic ideas of sequence that he has been labeled "difficult" by well-intentioned critics, and this putative encomium has inevitably been confused with "incomprehensible" and "obscure."… Johnson is not a difficult novelist in the sense that Henry James and Melville, Nabokov and D. H. Lawrence can often be difficult, and Tolstoy, George Eliot and Mann are not. In difficult fiction the words on the page suggest much more than they specifically denote; one intuitively understands that the writer has in mind an equation of meaning and consequence going beyond the language itself, and uncoverable only through a metaphoric, deliberately uncharted, collaboration between reader and writer. Uwe Johnson's meaning, on the contrary, is consistently lucid, hard and immediately accessible. This is as it should be, since the matrix of his novels is politics—the all-too-clear politics of a divided...