Schlink's tone is sparse; he writes with an "icy clarity that simultaneously reveals and conceals," as Ruth Franklin puts it, a style exemplified by the bluntness of chapter openings at key turns in the plot, such as the first sentence of chapter seven: "The next night I fell in love with her." His "clear and unadorned language enhances the authenticity of the text," according to S. Lillian Kremer, and the short chapters and streamlined plot recall detective novels and increase the realism. Schlink's main theme is how his generation, and indeed all generations after the Third Reich, have struggled to come to terms with the crimes of the Nazis: "the past which brands us and with which we must live." For his cohorts, there was the unique position of being blameless and the sense of duty to call to account their parents' generation: