A central "school" in modern fiction has been made up of writers who have considered themselves the outlaws and outcasts of modern society…. In the Forties and Fifties the tone of this literature had shifted from the tragic to the satirical: the comedy or farce of social desperation.

Erich Remarque's ["The Black Obelisk"] fits perfectly into this new category. The scene is the post-World-War-I Germany of economic inflation….

Whether it is great literature, is difficult to know; but it is such good reading that I am suspicious of it. The first half of the novel, at least, is a brilliant tragi-comedy of these poor provincial souls who have become so desperate as to be both outrageous and hilarious. The effect of the narrative is rather like a cross between "The Three-Penny Opera" and "The Tropic of Capricorn," just as Remarque has something of both Berthold Brecht and Henry...