THE DISTANT LOVER <i> by Christoph Hein (Pantheon: $15.95; 179 pp.) </i>

“I’m pretty well-liked,” reflects the narrator, a 40-year-old woman working as a doctor in East Germany. “I have plans. . . . I look younger than I am. . . . I’m healthy. I’ve made it. I’m fine.” We’re inclined to disagree, for the narrator’s urgent, forced tone suggests that this is less an assertion than a mantra, said repeatedly in the hope that the sum of the first five sentences will add up to the sixth, “I’m fine.”

In “The Distant Lover,” Christoph Hein, a prominent East German novelist, illustrates the errors in his protagonist’s emotional math. Showing that she is neither stronger nor happier for the security she has attained, Hein suggests that safety has its risks, too. The narrator suppresses her feelings of vulnerability (symbolized by a dream-image of walking over the splintered, jagged edge of a ruined bridge) by condescending ruthlessly on the dependencies of others and by dating men who don’t seem to need her: “I sat on the bed and told him I liked him very much, and he said I should watch out that I didn’t fall in love.”

Hein deliberately keeps the extent of the narrator’s self-deception a mystery until the novel’s latter half, leading us to accept at face value her reasons for remaining distant. As Hein reveals the self-hatred she has long suppressed, however, we find ourselves maintaining an ironic distance from her point of view. When her chief of staff is caught fooling around with a nurse, for example, she attacks him for joining her colleagues’ “temple of shabby little deeds,” but we are more heartened by the way they welcome him as a brother for his human imperfection. And in turn, we come to pity the independence she cherishes: “It used to bother me when I caught myself talking out loud, but it doesn’t anymore. It’s even sort of comforting: There’s music on the radio, and a human voice can be heard. What’s the difference if it’s my own?”