Eberhard Starusch has a number of problems. His teeth hurt. His dentist quotes Seneca constantly. One of his students is trying to come up with a dramatic protest of the Vietnam war. He has invented (or has he?) a number of events surrounding a mythical (or is he?) Field Marshal General who happens to be the uncle of Starusch's ex-fiancee, whom Starusch-- or someone else-- may or may not have murdered with a bicycle chain.

Such is the platform from which Local Anesthetic takes its course. Throughout this novel, I was reminded almost constantly of Alain Robbe-Grillet's style in The Erasers and The Voyeur. Worthy of imitation, certainly, as those are two of Europe's finest contributions to twentieth-century literature. but hard to imitate. And, were Grass not a consummate novelist, this would have come off even worse than it did.

One gets the feeling that, unlike Robbe-Grillet, Grass actually wanted the reader to be able to figure out what in the world was really happening in this odd, nightmarish world of late-sixties East Germany. But the only thing that reader can truly be sure of is the way that Scherbaum, the protesting student, is going to react to things. And Scherbaum's predictability, which would be a weakness in most novels, instead anchors the reader to some semblance of reality as the possibly-mythical Sieglinde Krings and her uncle weave in and out of the arguments the schoolteacher (Starusch) has with the dentist (who is never named), the arguments Scherbaum has with his sometime-girlfriend Vero, the debates Starusch has with his friend Irmgard Siefert, the wargames Sieglinde and the General conduct in a huge sandbox... you get the idea.

Grass manages (almost) to carry this novel off with his trademark combination of wit, silliness, and political invective against both sides of the utterly stupid post-WW2 and pre-wall-falling German government. But there seem to be too many places where things wander off and are never really picked up again. Too many loose threads are left undone at the end of this novel, and there isn't the kind of evidence one would need to wrap it all up oneself.

I'd recommend this particular Grass novel only to completists; for those who want to see an excellent example of this style of writing, check out the aforementioned novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet (the Grove Press editions) and be utterly blown away.