Still Life

By Geoffrey Wolff

GROUP PORTRAIT WITH LADY by HEINRICH BOeLL

Translated by LEILA VENNEWITZ 405 pages. McGraw-Hill. $7.95.

When Heinrich Boell won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, there was a general and aggressive nodding of heads. "Couldn't have happened to a more deserving or decent fellow," the nodders agreed. Boell is prolific. He is a senior member of Group 47, the informal association of such writers as Guenter Grass and Uwe Johnson, who took it upon themselves in 1947 to articulate the conscience of postwar Germany. Unlike Grass, whose fancy fixes persistently on violence and pain, Boell's characteristic manner is gently satirical.

As a Catholic humanist, writing from the stable center of literary modernism, he is concerned with the less obvious spiritual casualties of war--people whose sins and virtues are accumulations of undramatic acts and seemingly inconsequential decisions.

So it is with Leni, the central figure in Boell's newest novel. She has survived the war, but not without cost. Her husband and brother were killed. Her father's war-profits fortune has been lost.

At middle age, Leni remains a sensual and generous woman, but she no longer understands the world. In fact, Boell suggests, it is doubtful if she ever did.

During the war, Leni was cheerful and passively innocent, never bothering to distinguish between Jews and non-Jews. Now she has trouble fathoming why people are angry at her. Leni's lack of understanding is revealed to the reader at third hand by a character called Au., an abbreviation for Boell's imaginary "Author." He is a priggish, humorless drudge who is determined to assemble the life of his living subject through interviews with people who knew her.

His last interview is with Leni herself, but by then her story has been told. Why Au. has been compelled to tell it is a riddle that remains after the novel ends.

Junk. Perhaps it has something to do with an obsession of Leni's that prefigures Au.'s method. As a girl in a convent school, Leni learned to worship the orderly function of her organs, and the instruction had the force of an epiphany. Later she undertook her life's work: reproducing, with a child's paintbox and brush, "a cross section of one layer" of a nun's retina--6,000,000 cones and 100 million tiny rods. Au.

does the same for Leni's life.

Plainly, Au. is a fool. He jabbers incessantly about the tea served at his interviews; his temperature is raised by the sight of nuns; he press-gangs the reader into exhausting patrols in search of useless facts. Basically, he is a garbage collector who has found "an occupation that serves the purposes of cleanliness but is regarded as dirty."

The question is, why is Boell troubling to pick through Au.'s junk? If for satire, what is the precise target? That he would select so untheatrical a character as Leni to explore is consistent with the novelist's decisions in past fiction. Her passive character is consonant with the gentle and grandly rebellious natures of such literary antiheroes as Albert Camus's Mersault, who remains stubbornly outside the reach of his society. But where Camus creates a shattering mystery about alienation, Boell does not. What Leni is really like, and why Au. cares, are never transformed into powerful and disturbing questions.

Boell hints at his own intention in a voice that sounds more like him than that of the banal Au.: "What kind of world is this? What has happened to justice? Well, our intention is merely to indicate that many questions remain unanswered." It's a decent enough intention for a humanist to indulge, but it will not provoke life in a stillborn fiction.

Geoffrey Wolff

-Geoffrey Wolff

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