Martin Walser has often been accused by his detractors of writing novels without form and plays without plot. It is therefore surprising that he should now for the first time write a novella [Ein fliehendes Pferd], the genre which, as all students of German literature know, demands a single narrative marked by an extraordinary incident. The extraordinary incident is that the staid middle-aged schoolmaster Helmut Halm causes his old school and university friend Klaus Buch to fall from his yacht and apparently drown during a sailing trip on Lake Constance….

The story … contrasts two attitudes to middle age. Yet both men, like the horse of the title, are seeking to escape. Helmut is clearly afraid of the demands of life, while Klaus's youthfulness is only a fasçade that covers up a deep insecurity…. There is none of Walser's sometimes strident criticism of West German society in this...