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  • Literary Puzzler
  • Abby Nance (bio)
German for Travelers: A Novel in 95 Lessons. Norah Labiner. Coffee House Press. http://www.coffeehousepress.org. 270 pages; paper, $14.95.

In German for Travelers: A Novel in 95 Lessons, the character Betts is described as "good at nearly everything. And the things to which she did not excel quickly became unimportant to her." Ironically, the narrator's somewhat scathing critique of Betts, who is a minor character in Norah Labiner's multi-generational story of a family of dreamers, applies to the novel itself. In both her faults and her virtues, Betts could easily (and quite unintentionally) act as a personification of the novel. As a storyteller, Labiner, whose previous books include Miniatures (2003), an American Library Association Notable Book, and Our Sometime Sister (1998), a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers award winner, is good at nearly everything. The prose in German for Travelers is sharp, the dialogue gravitates to the space between heartbreaking and hilarious, the imagery is at times exquisite, and the form is so layered that when images resurface, they are met with delight. But perhaps because the book is so highly stylized, because everything that the reader sees, hears, even smells, is intentional, Labiner's attention to character and plot—the very things that propel a good yarn—is lacking.

German for Travelers centers around Dr. Jozef Apfel and his descendents and spans early-twentieth-century Berlin (pre- and post-WWII) to present-day Hollywood. The plot reveals Dr. Apfel's great grandchildren's quest to understand the family's history (which is peppered with secrets) and is told by a series of recurring voices, which, united, comprise the narrator of the story. The pastiche that results includes the pages of a travel guidebook (that one of the characters is reading), riffs on a romance novel (which one of the characters has written), as well as an omniscient narrator that circles the lives of characters, and an interviewer/psychoanalyst who poses questions and riddles, gossips, and tells jokes. What unites these disparate voices is that they all regard the characters with a trickster's moral ambiguity that borders on schadenfreude. In one of the book's most sarcastic passages, Betts is described as "clever and quick" only moments after her ex-fiancé (grandson of a Holocaust survivor) reflects on Betts and her girlfriends' shared history. "Their great-grandfathers had owned slaves, massacred Indians, felled trees, and manifested destiny. Betts had a Jewish friend named Stephanie who was called Step. Betts called her My Jewish Step friend." And while Betts's character is minor enough to be disposable, the polyphonic narrator seems to relish in exposing the secrets that haunt these characters and to delight in showing the reader how vapid, or clueless, or flawed the characters are, which makes them difficult to care about.

It is difficult to leap with the narrator from making fun of the family's father figure, a cuckolded Jewish psychoanalyst who "was known for his interpretive powers. He did not simply interpret; he interpreted his own interpretations," to witnessing the suicidal sadness that surrounds the moment when he "saw his own little world in ruins." These drastic tone shifts often undermine the moments that are meant to be conclusive. It is difficult not to giggle uncomfortably when one particularly shallow character—a Hollywood starlet—finds her voice or when her depressed brother bakes a cake in a moment that is meant to be revelatory. Still, the voice of this novel is that of a showstopper, in all its wickedness; it is the voice of the narrator, rather than those of the characters, that steals scene after scene.

Sometimes, the novel is teeming with life; other times, it lacks focus and feels unnecessarily disorienting. How and when information is revealed is problematic. Clarity falls behind beauty on the priority list, which means that the reader has to read actively—but not too actively because the coyness never justifies itself. For much of the book, the relationship between the characters is unnecessarily unclear. The structure seems to imply that figuring out who is the mother and who is the child will carry some kind...

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