By Bernhard Schlink. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. Pantheon Books, 260 pp, $28, hardcover

The Second World War is familiar territory for German writer Bernhard Schlink. The Reader—his spare, unsettling coming-of-age novel, a bestseller back in 1995—concerned a passionate late-1950s affair between a German teenager and a much older woman who was once a Nazi concentration-camp guard, and who had deliberately chosen weak prisoners for the gas chambers.

Homecoming’s narrator, Peter Debauer, spends his postwar childhood summer vacations at the home of his Swiss grandparents, who are the editors of a collection of short fiction. There, in the spare galley proofs his grandparents let him have for schoolwork, Peter discovers the incomplete tale of Karl, a German soldier who escapes from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp.

On his return to Germany after a series of dangers, Karl finds his wife more beautiful than ever, but “She stares at him, horrified, as if seeing a ghost.” Schlink draws parallels between this story and Homer’s Odyssey, and the trials the protagonists endure.

The end has been torn out and lost to homework. Years later, after coming across the incomplete manuscript again among his old toys, Peter starts a lifelong quest to find it, first in his grandparents’ old possessions, then by going to an unnamed German city, the location of the soldier’s fateful return.

The quest rings disquieting bells, and Peter begins to wonder if Karl’s story is based on truth, indeed on his own father, whose fate is hidden from Peter and then altered constantly by his mother.

In the course of this pursuit, Peter does too much navel-gazing to be sympathetic. He meets Barbara, the love of his life, in the unnamed city, but when she is confused by the unexpected return of a former husband, Peter’s cold response is to rip the phone out of the wall to stop her calling and ignore her pleading at his front door.

Themes of self and homesickness are strewn through the pages, but are never convincingly resolved. Peter’s identity starts to blur when he discovers Debauer might not be his real name. His father shifts from Swiss innocent to Nazi propagandist to famous law professor.

Disturbing mind games at an American academic retreat provide the only real dramatic tension, but it comes too late. Schlink should reread some Günter Grass to remind himself of how to bring real insight to postwar Germany.