[An Exemplary Life] is an exemplary novel. It is on the abiding subject of all good fiction—how should one live now?

Three people have met in Hamburg to edit an anthology for children, and in order to fill one chapter they must find some life-story which will serve as a suitably inspiring model for the young. These three consist of Pundt, an ageing schoolmaster, Rita Sussfeldt, a freelance busybody, and Heller, a trendy growing a little long in the tooth. Although they have been somewhat stylized respectively as conservative, shambolic liberal and progressive, they are scrupulously characterized as well….

Not surprisingly, no single piece of anthology prose can be accommodated to such differing tastes. Siegfried Lenz has fun with that, having constructed the splendid position whereby he can sit in literary judgment on his own material….

Slowly the European novel is reviving the old central belief that...