That money is the product of the phenomenal success of “The Reader,” his slender novel that won glowing accolades when it was published in Germany in 1995 and went on to become an international best seller. In the United States, TV talk-show host Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement helped boost sales to 2 million copies. Set in postwar Germany, it told the story of a young man’s discovery that his mysterious first lover, a woman more than twice his age, was a concentration-camp guard who was involved in a major atrocity. Now Schlink has published “Flights of Love” (308 pages. Pantheon Books), a collection of stories that touch on similar themes of guilt, betrayal and angst. Given his fresh status as a literary celebrity, this latest offering is getting careful scrutiny from the critics–winning him more praise in some quarters and angry denunciations elsewhere. For the mild-mannered professor from Berlin, it’s all a bit astounding.

Schlink’s writing is littered with autobiographical clues. Like the protagonist of “The Reader,” who was a law student, the younger and older German men who populate his latest stories are usually studying, teaching or practicing law, with the odd architect thrown in. Many of them are fascinated by the United States and, sometimes, by utopian societies–two of Schlink’s preoccupations, which he sees as very much linked. “In a way, you can say that the United States started as a utopian project, the city on the hill,” he says. Most of his grown men are either divorced or in failing marriages; his only marriage, to his high-school sweetheart, effectively ended after five years.

Schlink warns against reading too much into the obvious parallels. In “The Son,” one of his most poignant stories, a doomed father bemoans his lack of contact with his only child since his marriage broke up. In reality, Schlink has maintained close ties with his son, Jan, now a 29-year-old dentist. This story and others, he explains, are “more about autobiographical fears, hopes and fantasies than autobiographical experiences.” But what can be taken literally is the preoccupation of all of Schlink’s characters with guilt, with how they are perceived as Germans. “Guilt is one of the big themes of my generation,” he says. “It still shapes our consciousness.” He’s equally intrigued by how the next generations of Germans live with the burden of their history, how much guilt gets passed on or dissipates.

Growing up, Schlink always had a strong interest in writing. “When I got serious about legal scholarship, I thought that the joy of writing would fulfill itself in scholarly writing.” It did–but only for a while. “I realized something was missing from my life,” he recalls. In the early 1980s, when he was already a law professor, he used his time off to train as a massage therapist in California. Back in Germany, he also began making jewelry. Then he turned to writing mystery novels–a decision he attributes to his fear of going farther afield from his profession. “In writing mysteries, you create problems and then you solve them,” he says. “That’s pretty much what a lawyer does.” Having established a modest reputation as a successful mystery writer, he finally made a leap of faith with “The Reader,” never expecting that it would hurdle him into the publishing stratosphere.

The critics loved him at first. The New York Times called his novel “arresting, philosophically elegant, morally complex”; The Independent, the British daily, described it as “an unforgettable short tale about love, horror and mercy.” But inevitably, the first contrarian views surfaced as the applause grew louder. The American writer Cynthia Ozick charged that, by making the former concentration-camp guard a vulnerable figure hiding her illiteracy, Schlink offers “a means of exculpation.” His new collection of stories has elicited mixed reviews, with one furious 5,000-word tirade in the weekly The New Republic continuing Ozick’s line of attack. Ruth Franklin, the author of the piece, claims Schlink’s writing is “pernicious,” only pretends to grapple with serious issues, and that his stories are examples of “the morality play without the moral.”

Schlink shrugs off the criticism, arguing that it’s too simplistic to write off the crimes of former concentration-camp guards as the work of monsters, never recognizing that they belonged to the human race. “It doesn’t mean not condemning or that it’s any less awful what they did,” he says. “But we make ourselves unaware of the dangers of anything bad happening once again if we paint this as black and white in a way that buries the complexities.” And in grappling with today’s legacy of the Third Reich, Schlink paints a world where there are many shades of gray, where the settling of accounts–whether between lovers, or between an East German who informed for the secret police and a West German friend whom he reported on–is never easy. Schlink’s stories almost always throw in an added, unexpected twist.

If there is a stylistic criticism that has merit in some cases, it’s Schlink’s propensity to overuse rhetorical questions to spell out the behavioral and moral conundrums his characters find themselves in. But often this painful process of examination and self-examination is a key to the personality of the Germans in his stories. “All you do is analyze, use your curiosity to dissect things,” complains Sarah, the Jewish American girlfriend of Andi, a German law student in “The Circumcision.” When the analysis produces quarrels and then deliberate omissions, Andi realizes their relationship is in trouble. “And so he trimmed his love smaller and smaller,” Schlink writes. “Ticklish subjects not to be talked about were: their families, Germany, Israel, Germans and Jews, his work and hers…”

Such passages speak to Schlink’s deceptively low-key power as a writer. His characters, like their creator, wrestle every day with who they are, how heavily the past weighs on them and their troubled relationships, and whether they can ever escape its shadow. Yes, his stories are often inconclusive; there are no epiphanies, no clear-cut lessons. Don’t expect any rhetorical fireworks, either. Schlink has won his huge popular following by bringing to bear a penetrating intelligence about the psyche of his characters and an empathy for their dilemmas. Professor Schlink may be an expert on the letter of the law, but writer Schlink is an intrepid explorer of the much trickier terrain of the human heart.