Heinrich Böll's "Acquainted with the Night" is the first nonpolitical German novel I have seen since the war, and a fine book it is. Brief, unpretentious, technically conventional, it is worth reading because it is written out of the part of life that matters. American fiction more and more retreats into the suburbs. Geographically that may be all right, but spiritually it is slow death. Böll, on the other hand, has the courage and the talent to tackle his subject where it is most living.

A man and a woman who are no longer young and who already have more children than they can afford find that they are going to have yet another child. They live in a single room in a bombed-out German city; for some time the husband has come home only occasionally because he cannot abide being penned up in so little...