The day on which Adolf Hitler raided Ellen Koch's basement laundry on the Upper West Side was a cold, sunny autumn day, and he began by giving her a dressing-down. This is how the story of the seemingly droll old washerwoman Ellen Koch begins - and it is also the prelude to Matussek's debut as a story teller. The scenes, destinies and musical keys of these stories could hardly be more multifaceted and multicoloured: the story of Jim Dole, for example, the last cayuse who is the administrator of the legacy of his ancestors in the Green Springs reserve - until the day when he runs amok. Then there is the tourists' stronghold in Mexico which is almost the downfall of a stewardess, and young dealers who have some dramatic experiences in an Indian prison. There is a piece about the life of class-war-conscious affluent society kids in Germany in the 1970s, and a cameo drama about a German split - of a private kind - in the east and west. And again and again: New York, the glittering, desolate, challenging city of New York as the backdrop for an intellectual party, for a young woman who is waiting for her death sentence, and for a taxi driver who does not hold with keeping his views on life to himself. Matussek writes the sort of metropolitan literature, elegant and flexible, that we admire in American authors.