Self Serving: An Acquired Taste

SELF'S DECEPTION

By Bernhard Schlink

Translated From the German by Peter Constantine

Vintage. 334 pp. Paperback, $13.95

The German lawyer and novelist Bernhard Schlink is best known in this country for "The Reader," a novel about a teenage boy's affair with an older woman with a Nazi past. "The Reader" appeared here about a decade ago and reached the top of the bestseller lists, reportedly the only German novel ever to scale those heights. Schlink also writes a series about a German private investigator, Gerhard Self, and "Self's Deception" is the latest in this series. It is one strange book.

The novel's plot, although elusive, can be glimpsed now and then. Self, who is 69, is hired to find a missing college girl (this all seems to be taking place about 20 years ago). In time he does find her and learns that she has been involved with terrorists who attacked a U.S. military installation. He helps her escape the police because he thinks the case against her is "fishy," a view encouraged by his age-inappropriate crush on her. She flees, leaving him to figure out if one of her fellow terrorists killed a psychiatrist who had befriended her. Self comes to suspect that poison gas is stored at the U.S. base, and he joins forces with a freelance journalist who is determined to break the story.

This plot has potential, but Schlink never develops it because terrorism and the missing woman don't really interest him. The plot plays hide-and-seek with us, but the novel is really about the crusty old detective, his philosophy, his whimsy, his friends and his love of food, drink, women and his cat. This is one of the most discursive novels I've ever read. Let us note that Schlink has been both a judge and a law professor: This is a writer accustomed to captive audiences.

We learn that as a young man Self was a state prosecutor under the Nazis, but after the war, a guilty conscience led him to quit that job and become a private detective. He was unhappily married for many years, and after his wife's death he took up with a younger woman who wants to marry him but from time to time goes off with other men, which Self accepts. He often reflects on the indignities of age. For example, "Maybe I stumble around a bit more as I get older, but do I have any choice?" and "I have no bone to pick with my age, but there are early summer evenings when, if you're not young and in love, you're simply out of place in this world." For the record, Schlink himself turned 63 last week.

Self often visits a policeman friend whose hobby is replicating things with matchsticks. As he debates whether the Empire State Building or Rodin's "Kiss" should be his next project, we learn more than we need to know about the art of matchstick sculpture. Self has another friend, Philipp, a doctor who's "pushing sixty" and is about to marry a Turkish-born nurse. Schlink devotes three pages to the wedding, which is amusing enough until the groom turns up drunk and says he's changed his mind, whereupon the spurned bride's brother stabs him.

We then follow Philipp to a hospital, where he offers dubious theories about women: "Remember, Gerhard: Nice earlobes mean nice breasts" is followed by "Have you ever noticed how all women with pointed chins have broad hips?" A bit of dog-walking leads Self to philosophical rumination: "In general I have my doubts when it comes to evolution and progress, but the fact that erotic attraction between humans doesn't involve sniffing tree trunks and corners is without doubt a clear sign of evolutionary progress." He amuses us with odd factoids ("In the science section [of a newspaper], I learned that cockroaches lead warm and caring family lives") and endless details about his favorite cigarettes (Sweet Aftons) and beverages ("It's amazing how a shot or two of sambuca can make the world click into place"). We learn that his girlfriend's Sunday dinner of green dumplings and Thuringer leg of mutton "managed a seamless culinary unification of East and West German cuisines."

Self gives us his theories on murder (people commit murder, he says, for only one reason, "to save their life's illusions") and classical music (he understands Bach "the way one can only understand Bach when one is pushing seventy"). When Self mentions in passing a bottle of champagne "that I had won a few years earlier as third prize in a seniors' surfing competition," one's only possible response is bewilderment.

The novel has occasional nice touches. As Self walks near a psychiatric institution, "Shouts and laughter echoed against the wall of the old building like the impenetrable confusion of voices in an indoor swimming pool." Having spent several youthful years in such pools, and remembering that sound, I was pleased to see it captured in print. But in general, "Self's Deception" is a self-indulgent piece of work, rather maddening if you are not charmed by the haphazard musings of a certain old German.