Martin Walser—who is not to be confused with the pixilating Swiss stylist Robert Walser (1878-1956)—is the closest thing the West Germans have to John Updike. The comparison sounds facile, and it may not please either Updike or Walser (or it may), but it does help to locate some of the salient attributes of this emerging European master.

Near contemporaries—Walser was born in 1927, Updike in 1932—both writers are shrewd, bemused ironists presiding over the middle zone of the human spectrum. They are, on the whole, more interested in how society works, in how its members make their terms with existence, than in the ways it fails. In their attentiveness to the bright minutiae of the daily round—our social, financial, and sexual skirmishes—they could be called the anthropologists of postwar urban (and suburban) tribalism. While Walser is not quite as prolific as Updike, he needn't be ashamed of his output. In the last decade he has published Runaway Horse (1978), The Inner Man (1979), The Swan Villa (1980), Letter to Lord Liszt (1982), and the recently translated Breakers (1985). Leila Vennewitz, his gifted translator, has been matching him step for step.

Of course, the Updike comparison can only carry so far. It collapses entirely where style is concerned. Walser is quick and notational, his sentences twitching like the needle on a rotating seismograph cylinder. Updike's prose, by contrast, is brocaded and static. Thematically, too, there are differences. Updike likes to rehearse various scenes from what used to be called “the battle of the sexes.” Walser, though he does often write of husbands and wives, seems to reserve his best energies for capturing the myriad bonds and enmities that flourish between heterosexual males.

In Runaway Horse, Helmut and Sabrina Halm, who have gone to Lake Constance for Helmut's academic vacation, meet up with his boyhood friend, Klaus Buch, and his beautiful young wife, Helle. While transverse waves of sexual interest certainly pass between Helmut and Helle, the real propelling force of the narrative emerges from the subtly presented clash of wills between the two men. Similarly, in The Swan Villa, real estate agent Gottlieb Zürn goes through the most protracted Machiavellian exertions simply to get the better of his archcompetitor, Paul Schatz. And Letter to Lord Liszt is finally nothing more than Franz Horn's detailed epistolary accounting of his love-hate relationship with is business colleague, the man he has facetiously dubbed “Lord” Liszt.

At the beginning of Breakers, all indications are that another major hormonal duet will soon be sounding. Helmut Halm, who may yet turn out to be Walser's Harry Angstrom, is again the protagonist. A dyspeptic 46 in Runaway Horse, Halm is a few years older but otherwise unchanged. As the novel opens, he receives a phone call from his old and all-but-forgotten friend Rainer Mersjohann. Mersjohann is calling Stuttgart from California because he needs a favor. Can Helmut take a semester's leave from his gymnasium post to fill an unexpected vacancy at Washington University (read: Berkeley)? Helmut hesitates. Then, in spite of and because of Sabrina's objections, he agrees.

A few pages later, Helmut, Sabrina, and their grown-up daughter, Lena, are at the airport in San Francisco, waiting for their host to arrive. Helmut has been regaling the women with stories about the legendary Mersjohann: the giant, the poet, the man with the enormous, beautiful hands. When he finally arrives, Helmut nearly goes into shock:

No one could have a clearer mental image of Rainer than he did. He could have drawn or painted Rainer and reproduced him in any medium on earth; but this, he instantly saw, wasn't Rainer Mersjohann. … The man who now sat at the other end of the front seat was a stranger. Corpulent, with sagging bluish cheeks, and hanging from those cheeks a colorless curly beard that met under the double chin.

Helmut, as any reader of Runaway Horse will know, is a most agreeably disagreeable protagonist. He is cynical and self-involved. He is also a quivering bundle of anxieties and equilibrating vices; he cannot live without his cigars and his daily bottle of wine. But his first exposure to Mersjohann convinces him that he's a tyro—the man has downed five cans of beer before he's even taken his coat off. Tensions are already high. We brace ourselves for the bitter male imbroglio that's sure to follow.

It doesn't. Just this once, Walser decides to break pattern. Against our every expectation of idiosyncrasy, he does the shocking thing—he writes the conventional genre novel, at least most of one. The baffling Mersjohann will soon recede into the middle distance; our visiting professor will become desperately infatuated with … you guessed it, a beautiful student. And this, I think, is the time to say it: there is no more life in the professor-meets-student premise—none.

Walser makes the setup breathlessly episodic. Scarcely have the Halms settled themselves into their atmospheric hillside house before Helmut is off to his duties. Washington University is established with quick snapshots. A modernist collage of buildings. Interspersed redwoods and sequoias. American youth everywhere, healthy, tanned, lounging in the pretzel poses of dramatic leisure. Helmut instantly meets Mrs. Carol Elrod, the all-seeing department secretary. Just as quickly he is fumbling his way through his first German class. We get his distracted, peripheral observations. One student, for instance, wears a T-shirt that reads: “SMALL THINGS AMUSE GREAT MINDS.” Notes Helmut: “Between the line ending with THINGS and the one starting with AMUSE were the small things that weren't small.” This ground has been tilled for millennia.

It is after this first class that Helmut comes face to face with tall, blond, scantily clad Fran. She compliments his teaching, walks back toward the department offices with him. Her beauty and her assertiveness make Helmut nervous. A moment later he is chagrined—both Mersjohann and Carol Elrod have seen them walking together. And he hears about it soon after: “Carol said it was her fault: she should-have warned Halm of the typical California college girl—blond, Porsche, father a doctor in Pacific Heights, San Francisco, and sharper than a shark's tooth.” The warning is necessary; it is also, naturally, useless.

We could write the rest of the story on the back of a cocktail napkin—professor finds himself attracted to student, professor's wife has to leave to care for dying father, leaving professor free to … Walser does, to be fair, depart here and there from the clichés of the genre. Helmut never finds his way into bed with Fran, for one thing. But this may be more a problem than a saving grace. For if anything keeps Breakers from coming to life, it's the lack of the kinds of tensions that arise out of character development. The putative love interest is just too slight. Walser has not created a female character worthy of the consternation that she seems to inspire in her teacher. She really is the typical California college girl, and Helmut loses many points for not recognizing this. The goring need of the climacteric may be explanation enough in real-life situations, but fiction—at least in this sophisticated genre—demands a certain distillation and intensification of the quotidian. A good scene in the sack might have raised the temperature and the stakes—and forced a much-needed confrontation. As things stand, most of the plot centers on Helmut's conflicted and fragmented psyche. Which is finally not that interesting a place.

A predictable plot is one thing, an irritating stylistic mode is quite another. But reading Breakers, I had to wonder if in this instance the two were not causally related. Walser's normally quick-stepping prose has here become abrupt, almost curt. It is as if Walser himself could not bear to linger on the obvious and wanted to show his impatience. One offhand remark follows another; scenes are pruned back before they can grow into anything. Helmut is pushed through it all like a sedated extraterrestrial, a stranger in a strange land:

He was just about to invite Mrs. Elrod for lunch when he discovered that he had lost his wallet. A galvanizing shock. He simply could not afford to lose his wallet. It seemed best to behave as if he unfortunately already had a lunch engagement. “Aha,” said Mrs. Elrod. He pretended to have no idea of what she meant and said casually that his wife and friend were coming to lunch. Good God, where were these lies leading him? And why, he asked himself? See you this afternoon, then.

This shutter speed is fine for certain situations, but when it is used unremittingly—as it is in this novel—it becomes increasingly bothersome.

Walser was not, it appears, driven either by the imperatives of plot or style in composing Breakers. Perhaps he was aiming for satire. Dour German professor comes to swinging California, confronts American culture, academia, midlife urges, und so weiter. For some reason, though, Walser is just not able to draw blood. He hits at easy targets—American youth, faculty parties, departmental subterfuges, marital disaffection—but he hits them the easy way. Straight on. The reader would do much better to pick up David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury—they order this sort of thing better in England.

It is unfortunate that this lesser work by Walser comes just when he has begun to earn a name for himself among serious readers. Potential fans and converts may turn away with a shrug. Still, when I referred to Walser at the outset as an emerging European master, I intended the compliment. Novels like The Swan Villa, Runaway Horse, and Letter to Lord Liszt are charged with satiric and serious (the terms are not always antonyms) life. Walser has a special handle on the German sensibility—he charts its erratic oscillations between unreserved bonhomie and the severest punctilio. His obsessive, self-loathing, aggressively obstinate males reflect some of the deeper formations of the national soul. If you changed the names and places in any of these books, in an effort to Americanize them, the result would be ludicrous—as ludicrous as trying to retell Huckleberry Finn in a Rhenish setting. Walser is German to the bone. I hope that the future finds him once again cultivating the home garden.