[In the following excerpt, Bell evaluates the strengths and the weaknesses of The Reader.]

There are the novelists who cannot give us enough of life; they cram down our throats more than we can easily swallow, and we nearly choke on a mass of characters and scenes and intertangled plots, and on the macro-history of social movements, politics, war, revolution and economic change, as well as the micro-history of souls. They demand that we take into ourselves a whole potful of reality because this, they urge, is the only way to understand what happens. And there are novelists who elect to serve the small sample, or the distilled essence of individual relationships—just that. The writers of this second kind also claim to give us the knowledge that will explain our lives; everything we need to know is contained in the story of how a few persons feel about one another, they seem to say—all of history in the larger world is implied in a spoonful. …

In [a] novel of two hundred small pages, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader tells us what seems at first a timeless love story. It is only after forty pages that we can place the period in which it transpires by the casual mention that fifteen-year-old Michael Berg has been reading in his schoolbooks about the recent German past of the Third Reich. It all begins with a day when young Michael, suddenly coming down with hepatitis, collapses, vomiting, in the street on his way home from school. A strange woman washes his face in the courtyard of her building and helps him to his own house. When, after weeks, he is well enough to go out, his mother suggests that he go back to thank his rescuer and bring her a bunch of flowers. What happens, however, is the start of a love affair. With a remarkable simplicity and immediacy, Schlink tells the familiar tale of initiatory sexual passion as though it has never been told before. The older man who is relating this experience of his youth recovers moment after moment in all their incorruptible freshness. On the visit with the flowers he glimpses the woman as she pulls on her stocking and perceives, without consciously recognizing it, that she is beautiful: “slow-flowing, graceful, seductive—a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breasts and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body”—and she catches his stare. He comes again, and is asked to carry up a scuttle of coal from the cellar, dirties himself in the process, is given a bath and wrapped dry while, feeling his instant arousal, she tells him, “That's why you're here.” So, the schoolboy becomes a lover who learns not only how to receive but how to give pleasure, although the woman he loves is thirty-six. She is a streetcar conductor who often works a late shift, and he soon falls into the routine of finding her at home between the end of his schoolday and his family's suppertime.

He soon feels superior to his schoolmates—and a little detached from them. He is someone with a secret life he learns to protect, successfully concealing his visits to the person who has become the center of his life, working harder at his school work to make up for his hours of joy. The older man recalls, “My days had never been so full and my life had never been so swift and so dense.” Coming in to supper one time, he discovers that even his family have become part of a lost world:

I felt as if we were sitting together for the last time around the round table under the five-armed, five-candled brass chandelier, as if we were eating our last meal off the old plates with the green vine-leaf border, as if we would never talk to each other so intimately again. I felt as if I were saying goodbye. I was still there and already gone. I was homesick for my mother and father and my brother and sisters, and I longed to be with the woman.

There is little talk and, despite the intensification of intimacy, little growth of acquaintance in the ordinary sense between young Michael and “the woman.” He knows nothing much about Frau Schmitz's past, and only after half a dozen visits does he learn that her first name is Hanna. They have fights he does not understand. She makes him angry when, impatient to see her, he boards her streetcar and she ignores him, continuing to joke with the driver. He arouses her incomprehensible fury when they take a four-day bike trip together. Having gone off to fetch breakfast while she is still asleep, he returns to find her livid, and she thrashes him with her belt. Only much later does he understand that she could not have read the note he left on the night table, and thought herself abandoned. The middle-class boy who probably has never met an illiterate person did not guess the real reason she loves to have him read to her from the classic German literature texts in his school bag—and that her shame compels her to conceal this reason. In any case, he has already begun to betray her by pretending to friends that they know him completely. Once, she comes to the public swimming pool when he is there with pals, and he glimpses her watching from a distance, but makes no sign. And then, she is gone without warning, her flat vacated, her new location unknown.

In the second half of the book the world and history enter. When Berg sees Hanna again, it is seven years later in a courtroom. He is now a law student, and he has dropped in to watch one of the many trials of rank-and-file Nazi criminals belatedly taking place. Hanna appears among the accused. She is being tried for her role as a guard in Auschwitz. As the trial progresses it becomes plain that she had taken part in the selection of prisoners to be sent to the furnaces, though she sometimes managed to give some of the younger, weaker girls another few weeks of life; it is said that she made these “favorites” read to her in the evenings. Then, when a barn in which some of the prisoners had been locked was set on fire during a bombing, she and the other guards failed to open the doors. Hanna responds to both charges—as the accused in such trials generally do—that the guards had no alternative. They had only done what they had to.

Her own responsibility may have been a bit less than charged. Berg knows, now, that she could not have drawn up the protocols and reports she is accused of writing—though she admits to having done so—still hiding her illiteracy. He thinks of telling this to the judge on the possibility that her sentence might be mitigated. But he fails to do so. The narrator remembers how his feelings seemed “numbed” during the trial. As he gazes across the space of the court at the woman whose body was so thoroughly known to him, he feels no involvement. And it is a numbness he detects in others—even the judges. And he reflects, now, that this same numbness must have been felt, at the time, by the victims as well as the perpetrators of the horrors of the death camps. The prisoners, themselves, as survivor literature describes, must often have entered the state “in which life's functions are reduced to a minimum, behavior becomes completely selfish and indifferent to others, and gassing and burning are everyday occurrences.” He observes, too, that this same numbness has overcome the generation to which he belongs. “That some few would be convicted and punished while we of the second generation were silenced by revulsion, shame and guilt—was that all that was to it now?” The story has some continuity for us to discover beyond the moment when Hanna is sentenced—a continuity in which he does not attempt to recover any intimate relation with “the woman” of his youth though he sends her tape recordings. Eventually, she learns to read, and educates herself in prison, but when she is about to be released, she hangs herself, and she leaves her savings to Holocaust victims. For Berg, the numbness remains.