[This is an excerpt from a longer essay on Böll's novels in these pages.]

Group Portrait with Lady is written in the mode of a formal, dogged, ultimately absurdist report — Beckett's name comes up repeatedly in Böll's novels — and describes a whole collection of what in another culture would be called drop-outs, apparent failures who are resolutely human in a world largely made up of humans become beasts. The tone here is remarkable, estranging, awkward, comic:

 

The female protagonist in the first section is a woman of forty-eight, German: she is five feet six inches tall, weighs 133 pounds (in indoor clothing), i.e. only twelve to fourteen ounces below standard weight ... It would be better after all to convert the police officer's report into indirect speech rather than quote it verbatim. This results, of course, in a considerable shift in style, and many a nice little detail goes out the window.

 

Borrowing a mode of indirection from Thomas Mann, but taking it into new zones of dryness and apparent inadequacy, this voice says almost everything it has to say by pretending to lose the essential and announcing the loss.