For a novel about terrorism, "The Safety Net" is remarkably deficient in suspense, of both the ordinary thriller sort and of any more complex kind, an imperiled progress toward wisdom, let's say. This is due in part to Böll's decision to keep the terrorists at the far edges of the story, so that we only know about them through the reports and musings of others.

But more responsible, I think, is Böll's wider intention, which is not only to examine the effects of terrorism on German life, but also to issue another J'accuse against the soullessness of present German life. To this end, he incorporates a half-dozen or more subplots, including a love affair between Tolm's daughter Sabine and one of the policemen guarding the family and an episode about a priest who leaves the church for a woman.

These subplots are presumably meant to provide a richer texture, a more varied perspective. They're intended, too, I think, to establish connections between ordinary, decent life, erotic and otherwise, and the extremism, social and political, that menaces it. But the connections are tenuous and, what's worse, arbitrary….

One of the difficulties in Böll's fiction has always been his attempts to mingle or fuse orders of reality, to make the quotidian yield overarching truth. Another is his distribution of themes and points of view among so large a number of characters. The few novels in which he does allow a single consciousness to provide a focus are, I think, his best: "The Train Was on Time," "The Clown" and, especially, "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum." Much of his best writing is to be found in his short stories, almost all of which are told in the first person; many of them are sharp, swift, even elegant. Stories such as "The Man With the Knives" or "Children Are Civilians Too" have none of the ponderousness, the murk and fuzz, the strained symbolism that mar nearly all Böll's self-consciously "major" novels.

In books like "The Safety Net," Böll tries to do too much. One of his literary heroes is Tolstoy, whose scope and grandeur are a dangerous lure for any writer. Like Tolstoy, Böll believes strongly in committed literature, "useful" writing, and this helps account for his frequent moralizing tone and his scattering of ideas among too many characters and through as many aspects of social reality as he thinks will profit from being exposed.

This committedness also helps account for Böll's reputation, which is surely based less on purely literary strengths than on an earnest humanitarianism. His Catholicism, for instance, which is present as subject or coloration in nearly all his novels, is at bottom a type of Christian humanism that is opposed to the institutionalized authority and moral teachings of the church. Although Böll is more sophisticated and more "literary," the American writer he seems to me most to resemble, if only in his dogged quest for justice (and his occasionally deaf ear) is James T. Farrell. (p. 21)

Yet Böll's literary powers fall far short of those of an innovative writer like Grass or the late Arno Schmidt, whose "Evening Edged in Gold" is probably the most important novel published in any language in recent decades, with the possible exception of the Austrian Thomas Bernhard's "Correction."

For tugging against Böll's prédilection d'artiste is his obsessive dedication to a more humane society. The two urgencies aren't necessarily contradictory, but in Böll's case their clash has resulted for the most part in damaged art, something "The Safety Net" unhappily exemplifies. Still, Böll is a good man, a servant of values who deserves our respect. In an essay on Tolstoy he once wrote: "May every author be read word for word, may every author be allowed his tedious passages, his stubborness." While to grant Böll this isn't likely to make us enthusiasts of his writing, it doesn't seem to be too much to ask. (p. 22)