Reading a novel by Heinrich Böll is to pick through a pile of rubble with a teaspoon, or with bare hands. Shards of domestic pottery, bits of cloth almost unrecognizable as clothing, a doll with no face, half a singed photograph emerge slowly and painfully from a great deal of disintegrated brick and plaster. These shattered fragments just begin to suggest the outlines of a former life, when the grim weight of detail renders us numb, and the ponderous but relentless pace with which Böll forces it all into our attention makes a bilious taste of resentment rise in our throats. We were, after all, here to be entertained by good literature.

Yet we cannot stop; the shreds and shards look ominously familiar. The jaunty archaeological dig in some other era, in other people's lives is over. Too late, we realize that the author has us...