Book 5: Homecoming

Homecoming, from German writer Bernard Schlink, is a treasure. It’s hard to describe how it made me feel. The only way I can explain is that about halfway through book I realized that I did not know the narrator’s name (it’s only given once, but it’s on the back of the book), and I did not care.

The novel is the story of Peter Debauer; he is the narrator. It begins with his idyllic summers with his paternal grandparents in Switzerland. Peter has no father to speak of, as he died in the war and no one, not his mother or grandparents, are very forthcoming with details. Peter’s father is not an enormous presence in the first half of the book. He is mentioned, but not a key to the events of Peter’s life. Suddenly Peter’s father becomes an absent character and it becomes clear that the novel is a son’s search, both metaphorical and then physical, for his lost father.

Schlink’s prose is practically intoxicating. He describes the minutiae of life, an apple eaten, a book read, an affair begin and ended, in simple, touching terms. Even without remembering his name, I felt like I knew Peter, and I was frequently devastated by the bare emotion on the page. There is a great deal of honesty about the human condition in this novel. For example, when he is left by a lover, Peter describes how well he handles the break up, and how he parlayed it into other affairs, good humor, and sympathy from friends. An then, suddenly:

“No, that’s not what happened. I wish it had; I wish I had been so ironic, removed, in charge. Instead I was childish.”

What follows is a chapter listing Peter’s faults as he deals with heartbreak. He is cruel, dull, lazy and hateful. He treats women terribly and becomes a user of them. His friends finally pull him aside and intervene, which he ignores. Like all of us, he is childish and spiteful until ready to be human again. Schlink’s description of this state is striking. He knows us, he knows me, because he knows himself and bares it in his work.

The novel feels, for a long time, like it nothing but the story of a man’s like. He grows up, goes to school and finds a job, falls in and out of love and fights with his mother. But the book quietly becomes a mystery as well. As a child, in those summers with his grandparents, Peter was given reams and reams of paper from a series of novels edited by his grandparents, “Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment.” His grandparents gave him the bound galleys because paper was scare in Germany after World War II. They warned him, and not in a mysterious way, to never read the novels printed on one side, that there were better things for him to be reading. Peter always obeyed until out of sheer boredom, he began the story of a soldier coming home from the war. He is enchanted by the story and disappointed when he realizes that he has already torn out the ending for a school paper.

Years later, Peter rediscovers the story when unwrapping items from storage. He becomes engrossed all over again, and now, with a college education, recognizes the soldier’s story as a retelling of The Odyssey, but still has no ending or even the author’s name. Over many years, Peter returns and abandons the mystery of the story, which becomes the mystery of his lost father and own birth.

Homecoming is also the story of modern Germany. Peter was born during World War II, and his story extends over decades. He flies to Berlin the week the wall is falling and the book ends soon after September 11th. The character of his country changes slowly as he ages and is so artfully rendered that the landscape of his home town, and the Switzerland of his youth, are as equally characters, if not more so, than people. It is a novel of “fathers and sons”, as the book jacket proclaims, but it is also a novel of modern Germany.

As mundane as many of the events seem, the ending of the novel is kind of a puzzle. Peter travels to New York as a visitor at Columbia. There he is drawn further into the story, specifically through The Odyssey and its murky morality. He is also subjected to a strange psychological experiment; it’s enough out of character with the rest of the book to have made me question Schlink’s decision to include it, but the tone of the story never changes. Schlink powers through this strangeness (and trust me, I’m dieing to give it away), but ultimately it is rewarding. Peter not only perseveres, but he breaks with the past, finishing his own ambivalent odyssey.