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As usual, love à la Remarque al most but not quite works, trailing away into a gentle melancholy, a secondary sort of exile and loss. And those sub plots—amusing, a bit cynical, dotted with European jokes about America—constitute the best parts. By their very gaucherie they suggest appealingly the embarrassment of an author trying to bridge modern experience, from the sheer horror of war to the sheer banality of peace.
Remarque's curious polarization between holocaust and Hollywood may reflect less calculation than nasty skeptics have supposed. In retrospect, his tales seem the defense mechanisms of a romantic trapped in a bad time. Remarque needed illusions as large, as desperate, as his master disillusion with World War I. But he was not alone. So, for better and for worse, did his readers.