Mr. Abish's mind delights in dualities. His gift for irony feeds on the contradictions in human thought and action. All his writings are an assault on the reassuring familiarity of everyday things. [In "How German Is It"] Mr. Abish seems to be saying that it is the menace lurking beneath the surface that appeals to the new Germans as a way of experiencing, if only deviously, the unassimilated terror of their past.

The novel evolves as a series of encounters, sexual and familial, all designed to probe the unease and guilt beneath the surface of German prosperity and well-being. The unearthing of the mass grave beneath the site of the new town and the dramatic blowing up of a bridge on the East Frisian Islands by Ulrich's former wife are the highlights of the plot.

"How German Is It" can be read as a quasi-quest novel or as a satire on the new Germany, but basically it is an extended short-fiction, a series of travel-log entries pieced together with scissors and paste. Too little scissors, too much paste.

Why not a novel? There are ideas, but no development of ideas. There are characterizations, but no character development. (For example, the brilliant set-piece about Franz, the mad waiter and erstwhile "family retainer" to the von Hargenaus. Franz spends his Sundays constructing a model out of headless matches of the concentration camp on which the town sits. Like Max Frisch's "Man in the Holocene," who builds a pagoda out of "crispbread" to elude madness during a flood, Franz's obsessive "hobby" devours him with the inexorable logic of madness.)

The novel as an exploration of language then? This one might expect from Mr. Abish. (pp. 8-9)

Everywhere connective tissue has been added, to the detriment of the text. Incongruous levels of speech are juxtaposed with unintended comic effects…. [It] becomes unclear whether Mr. Abish is trying to parody the convoluted phrasing and stiffness of German or whether he is incapable of writing straightforward English himself. One's discomfort increases when one notes the actual misuse of words: "mechanistic" for "mechanical," "evaluate" for "assess," "limitations" for "limits," "in effect" for "in fact." His redundant phrases—"luminous light," "inundated by a deluge"—are matched in number only by adjectival clusters, generally three, presented in order of diminishing intensity (as in "the startling, the shocking, the unexpected"). Finally, recurrent sloppiness with regard to detail further shakes the reader's confidence in this author. When Ulrich leaves Paris, his clever French friends try to mask their disdain for things German by name-dropping the latest German literary names; but of the names they drop, one is Swiss (Bichsel), one Austrian (Handke), and the third, Kemposki, Mr. Abish misspells.

As a log entry, "This is the place (Switzerland) where Musil died, where Rilke died, where Gottfried Keller lived and died, where Jean Jacques Rousseau was born, and where only a few years ago Nabokov lived," this George Washington-slept-here business may be acceptable. But in the context of a novel, these allusions to literary personae must serve some real purpose if they are not to sound merely pretentious. (p. 9)