The Good German

Joseph Kanon

Joseph Kanon's third novel is a grimly humorous little tale of postwar intrigue. It focuses on Jake Geismar, a wartime correspondent sent back to Berlin to do a series of articles for Collier's. He also has a hidden agenda: find his wartime love, a native Berliner who's gone missing. Complications abound from the get-go, including a professional relationship dangerously close to turning personal, a blowhard Senator, and the head of the nascent war crimes division, all of whom are staying in the same house as Geismar. And they get even more complex from there. Perhaps "little" isn't the word I'm looking for to modify "tale."

It could have been, though. While Kanon is deft enough at weaving his subplots together, keeping things believable, and providing enough suspense to keep the reader turning page after page, the novel's major failing is a sporadic lack of pace; sections of it, including the interminable beginning, crawl along at the speed of a quaalude-addicted sloth. Pieces of the novel could have been edited far more than they were without bothering plot or characterization in any way. The upside of this is that none of the novel's other slow spots approach the length of Book I, so if you make it through the beginning, sailing should be clear for the majority of the remaining time spent following Jake and friends around postwar Berlin.

Postwar Berlin is not a nice place to be, but we don't expect it to be. Kanon is excellent at adding those details that allow us to develop a feeling of creeping tension even if Geismar is doing nothing but walking down a street in midafternoon. When he's firing on all cylinders (and he is most of the time), Kanon keeps us riveted; it's possible to lose hours at a time in here, even whole afternoons. The plot twists and turns, and Kanon throws us enough curve balls so that, even if we can predict the ultimate resolution of the novel, the stuff between point A and point B is still well worth reading.

Recommended, but be prepared for some slow going, especially at first.