The German Lesson is good, but not nearly so good as it appears. Siegfried Lenz writes in what I'd call the accretive style: sentences go three steps forward, two steps back. There is an illusion of lush detail, great perception, but the novel is like a box of cornflakes: it tends to settle in transit…. The German Lesson reads like old Dr. Kildare dialogues, not memorable, but very memorizable….

Lenz imitates—but seldom approaches—really hard and incisive writing.

This, of course, is the Gunter Grass style. Siegfried Lenz does seem awfully derivative. If either novelist should happen to pass, say, a paint factory, there will follow one chapter, perhaps two (called probably "The Joys of Paint"), complete with brochures, specifications and color charts. The digressive method has its venerable ancestry: Jacques le Fataliste out of Tristram Shandy. In The German Lesson we have predictable devices, "How shall...