Michael Dirda
A young German struggles to find the painful truth about his father -- and himself.

By Michael Dirda
Sunday, January 6, 2008

HOMECOMING

By Bernhard Schlink

Translated from the German by Michael Henry Heim

Pantheon. 260 pp. $24

Near the end of Bernhard Schlink's international bestseller, The Reader, its German law student narrator rereads The Odyssey and writes that he remembered it as "the story of a homecoming. But it is not the story of a homecoming. How could the Greeks, who knew that one never enters the same river twice, believe in homecoming? Odysseus does not return home to stay, but to set off again. The Odyssey is the story of a motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile." This, he adds, also mirrors the history of the law.

These elements -- The Odyssey, a temporary return home, restless change, even the nature of the law -- are all fundamental to Schlink's fine new novel, Homecoming. In a quiet, conversational style similar to that of The Reader (and to so many classic European r¿cits), Peter Debauer recalls the major events of his life: his visits to his grandparents in Switzerland, childhood with his hard-edged but beautiful single mother, the books he read, the women he loved. At times he can grow quite lyrical about the past:

"The crunch of the gravel, the buzz of the bees, the scratch of the hoe or rake in the garden -- since those summers at my grandparents' these have been summer sounds; the bitter scent of the sun-drenched boxwood, the rank odor of the compost, summer smells; and the stillness of the early afternoon, when no child calls, no dog barks, no wind blows, summer stillness."

At his grandparents' house, young Peter hears stories of heroes and military victories, but is perplexed when the Swiss win one battle because a knight named von H¿nenberg betrays the Austrian battle plans. How can a traitor be a hero? Peter's grandfather replies that "if you can do the right thing only by being underhanded, being underhanded doesn't make it wrong." Is this true? When Peter grows older, he spends years working on a doctoral thesis about the uses of justice. But he is unable to finish it.

As the somewhat wistful pages of Homecoming go by, the reader more and more starts to wonder about Peter's father. The widowed mother never talks about him, and the grandparents discuss only his boyhood. What happened to this charming Swiss student during World War II? How did he die? These and related questions subtly disturb the calm surface narrative, like a powerful but unseen current, until Peter finally starts to go in quest of the elusive truth.

Years earlier, while still in school, Peter tells us that he once happened to read a few pages of some discarded galleys from a publishing series edited by his grandparents called "Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment." This particular novel recounted the adventures of a German soldier, Karl, who escapes from a Russian prison camp and slowly makes his way home. After overcoming numerous dangers but gradually losing all his companions, Karl eventually reaches his old apartment, eagerly climbs the steps, and in the doorway makes out the youthful figure of his wife, who "stares at him, horrified, as if seeing a ghost. . . . She is carrying a little girl who can be no more than two, while another one, a bit older, clings to her and peeks out coyly from behind her apron; moreover, a man is standing next to her with his arm around her."

What happens next? Strange to say, the story's conclusion is nowhere to be found, despite Peter's search through all the published volumes of "Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment." In subsequent years, the boy tries hard to discover the name of the novel and its author, but for a long time without any success. Yet after his grandparents' death, the grown-up Peter finally manages to unearth another chunk of the narrative and so learns more of the soldier Karl's adventures on his homeward journey. It takes him a surprisingly long while before he realizes that Karl's various trials, exploits and temptations are actually patterned after those experienced by Odysseus. Yet for some reason the novel's unknown author chose to deviate from The Odyssey's happy ending. Why?

At first this seems just an idle literary question. After all, The Odyssey has been mined for centuries as the dominant pattern for homecoming stories of all sorts. Think of Joyce's Ulysses, Wallace Stevens's poem "The World as Meditation" and the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" What's more, there were other Nostoi, as the Greek termed a whole genre of mini-epics about the homecomings of the various heroes of the Trojan War. Matters grow unsettling, however, and burst the bounds of mere fiction when Peter convinces himself that he recognizes the actual apartment building from the novel. Screwing up his courage, he finally rings its bell one day, climbs the steps and sees a young woman waiting for him in an apartment doorway.

From this point Homecoming grows increasingly intricate: Is life beginning to imitate art? Is Peter becoming Karl, or was Peter's father Karl? And who is the novel's unknown author? Like a literary sleuth or the protagonist in an early Paul Auster novel, the now-obsessed Peter follows up every clue, trying to learn more about both this mysterious writer and his equally mysterious father. Meanwhile, he also falls in love, the Berlin Wall comes down, and Eastern European archives, full of many secrets, are suddenly accessible again. Everywhere the lies of the past are being exposed, however unwelcome or uncomfortable the consequent realities might be.

But can the truth of the past -- wie es eigentlich gewesen, as it really was -- be so easily determined and verified? Isn't it possible that Odysseus simply made up all his adventures? When Peter encounters a distinguished expert in "deconstructionist legal theory," he learns that in Homer's epic "everything was in flux: the work's entire intent and meaning, its portrayal of truth and lies, loyalty and betrayal." In fact, "what we take for reality is merely a text, what we take for texts merely interpretations. Reality and texts are therefore what we make of them. History has no goal: there is no progress, no promise of rise after fall, no guarantee of victory for the strong or justice for the weak. We can interpret it as if it had a goal . . . as if good and evil, right and wrong, truth and lies actually existed, and as if the institutions of law actually functioned. We have the choice of either droning back what has been droned into us or deciding for ourselves what we want to make of the world, who we want to be in it, and what we want to do in it. We come to our truth, which enables us to make decisions, in extreme, existential, exceptional situations. The validity of our decisions makes itself felt in the commitment we make to carrying them out and the responsibility we take for carrying them out." Such is the so-called iron -- not the golden -- rule.

Peter's girlfriend, Barbara, calls this point of view evil. It might be the outlook of an existential confidence trickster, a survivor at any cost. In Homecoming's conclusion, Schlink -- like other novelists before him (Gilbert Adair, Malcolm Bradbury) -- invokes the case of Paul de Man, the revered Yale professor who was discovered to have written anti-Semitic articles in his European youth. But he also alludes to the famous "obedience to authority" experiments of Stanley Milgram, in which college students were pressed to follow orders and essentially torture their classmates. Peter's personal odyssey ultimately becomes an inquiry into the nature and consequences of deceit. It asks, in effect, the painful question that has haunted two generations in Germany: What did you do in the war, Daddy? And how did you justify it?

While Homecoming addresses complex and painful matters, its telling is nonetheless a model of grace and clarity. While obliquely covering 50 years of modern European and American history, Schlink also makes us care about the confused and often weak-willed Peter Debauer. Can he handle the truth? And what will become of him afterward? Like The Odyssey, Homecoming is ultimately about love -- not only its wonder but also its pain, not only its recurrent failure but also the possibility of its preservation and renewal. *

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com.