Except for a few scenes set in Hollywood, Robert Ross, the principal character in ["Shadows in Paradise"], explores and uses the sights, sounds and people of Manhattan, as Remarque himself knew them in the closing years of the Second World War.

For readers of our own time, all-too-conscious of what has become of Gotham or, if you will, Mayor Lindsay's inadvertently ironic "Fun City," Remarque's title smacks of poignancy, if not sarcasm….

But we soon discover that what the title suggests to us is not at all what the author intends. For Ross and his friends, New York is indeed a paradise; so, too, are whatever other portions of America that they know. They themselves are the shadows….

[Ross's] affair with Natasha and his experiences as an assistant to an art dealer fill stage center of the novel. In the background we glimpse the lives and destinies of his immigrant friends….

While studying two paintings by El Greco in the Metropolitan, Ross realizes that everything is "at once connected and unconnected" and that a conception of coherence is "nothing but a human crutch, half lie and half imponderable truth." This insight, which seems to be familiar to Remarque, provides a clue to understanding why this, the last of his novels before his death, is so annoyingly unsatisfying….

Remarque has something to say that is worth pondering; what happens to his characters in 1944–45 is not so remote from what many people know at first hand today—albeit for somewhat different reasons. But the novel's central insight is never developed in any consistent way. Remarque's angle of vision seems blurred. Instead of pursuing his intention, he suddenly introduces, for no useful purpose, the language and preoccupations of the washroom. He gives more attention to the consumption of vodka than to the exploration of his theme.

The central relationship between Ross and Natasha lacks focus—no small fault in a novel written from the retrospective viewpoint of a first-person narrator. This very lack of focus arouses a suspicion about the book's true character. What we have here may be a book-for-a-script-for-a-Hollywood-film, the fate of so many of his other novels. This is a waste; Remarque's people deserve a better fate.