On its lacquered surface, Shadows in Paradise shows all the familiar Remarque gloss. There is the typically commercial title, second only to Heaven Has No Favorites. There is the often wordy dialogue—pretentiously sophisticated, as if spoken by an impostor duke. There is the slightly too chic setting: in this case, places like El Morocco, the fashion-and-art salons of New York and the swimming pools of Hollywood in 1944.

A young German wearing the new name of Robert Ross has just arrived in America, the victim of both French and German concentration camps. He is, as Remarque must put it, "an Orestes pursued by the distant cries of the Furies." How will this creature of survival be restored to the human race? Remarque knows but one way. He produces his interchangeable Remarque woman, in this instance an exotic model named Natasha, half Anna Karenina, half Playmate of the Month….

As usual, love à la Remarque almost but not quite works, trailing away into a gentle melancholy, a secondary sort of exile and loss. And those subplots—amusing, a bit cynical, dotted with European jokes about America—constitute the best parts. By their very gaucherie they suggest appealingly the embarrassment of an author trying to bridge modern experience, from the sheer horror of war to the sheer banality of peace.

Remarque's curious polarization between holocaust and Hollywood may reflect less calculation than nasty skeptics have supposed. In retrospect, his tales seem the defense mechanisms of a romantic trapped in a bad time. Remarque needed illusions as large, as desperate, as his master disillusion with World War I. But he was not alone. So, for better and for worse, did his readers.