Hound of Hell

DOG YEARS by Guenter Grass. 570 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $6.95.

It is scarcely surprising that a novel about the monstrous should prove to be a monstrosity. However, the third novel by Guenter Grass is an impressive monstrosity.

Like his other books, The Tin Drum and Cat and Mouse, and like the rest of the new generation of German fiction, it deals with the Nazi era. Dog Years is powerful, jumbled, symbol-cluttered, too long, exhausting. It drifts in and out of fantasy, scratches at memories as if they were swords too dangerous to grasp, and says nothing directly. The narrative follows, circles about, sniffs at, is diverted from, and returns to the careers of two friends, boys who were born in 1917 in a fishing village on the Baltic.

Eddie Amsel is fat, clever, half-Jewish. Walter Matern is lean, brooding, half-heartedly Aryan. Matern protects Amsel when other schoolboys mock his fatness or yell "sheeny." He cannot tell why he does this, nor why sometimes he squirms away from his obligation to protect and yells "sheeny" himself. The unbreakable and intolerable bond between the two friends-one not wholly a Jew or admirable, the other not wholly an Aryan or despicable--gives the book its symbolic structure.

Lost Teeth. Amsel's hobby is to make satirical scarecrows. To obtain some Nazi uniforms for his creations, he persuades Matern to join the Storm Troopers. Matern joins and then gets caught up in the group spirit; he perversely leads a gang of troopers to Amsel's house, knocks out all his teeth and leaves him senseless.

Amsel survives, takes on another name and 32 gold teeth and lives through the war. Matern also survives, much diminished in spirit by his awareness of the guilt of other Germans. He becomes a fanatically vengeful de-Nazifier, whose method is to spread his own gonorrhea among the wives of men on his private list of war criminals. But two diseases cannot beget health, and this does not ease his soul. Can he himself be guilty of something? He is harassed by a dog who has begun to follow him like a conscience--a magnificent black German shepherd who once belonged to Hitler and who is, by significant chance, the grandson of a bitch Matern owned as a boy.

At last Matern is reunited with Amsel, who smiles at him in implacable friendship with his 32 gold teeth. The reader now becomes aware of increased and complicated cranking from the novel's symbolic machinery. Amsel, the suffering half-Jew, has grown rich by developing his childish scarecrows into elaborate mechanical puppets that are programmed to act out scenes of German guilt. They are much in demand among guilt-ridden Germans, and Amsel employs a large force of workers to build their elaborate machinery and package them in an abandoned potash mine. In a grotesque parody of that old literary device, the descent into hell, Amsel leads Matern and his black dog through his guilt factory. The black dog, who appears to embody both the bestial and the sturdily virtuous elements of the German nature, remains in Amsel's underworld as a Cerberus. But Matern is allowed to return to the surface and soap himself clean in what could be a mockery of the Jewish rites of forgiveness and absolution.

Lost Frenzy. Mockery is what Grass's enormously involved novel arrives at. Guilt becomes congested, swells, sours, demands release. But Grass allows no purgations; he refuses to accept the currency of remorse and the result is gross inflation.

Grass and such writers as Jakov Lind and Heinrich Boll have set up as hounds of hell for the German conscience. But what happens to hounds of hell who are also novelists who must produce fresh works? The moral truth of the German crime remains constant, but no literary frenzy can prevent endless restatements of that truth from losing their effectiveness. Three novels on the same theme do not constitute endless restatement, and Dog Years, although not so overpowering as The Tin Drum, has its own considerable power to shock. Still, the reader must wonder what Grass and his colleagues will find to say in succeeding books.

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