The dinner A novel

Review by New York Times Review

NORTH American readers care inordinately that fictional characters be likable. This preference is strange, given that few real people are thoroughly nice and that those few aren't interesting. Surely what actually matters is that characters clear this vital hurdle: that they be interesting. "The Dinner," the newly translated novel by the Dutch writer Herman Koch, has been a European sensation and an international best seller. But of course in the Netherlands, the vituperative Austrian Thomas Bernhard remains popular, whereas in the United States he is the acquired taste of a cultish few. The success of "The Dinner" depends, in part, on the carefully calibrated revelations of its unreliable and increasingly unsettling narrator, Paul Lohman. Whatever else he may be, likable he is not. There is a bracing nastiness to this book that grows ever more intense with the turning of its pages. It will not please those who seek the cozy, the redemptive or the uplifting. If you are such a reader, you may stop right here. Although rare, there are American books that have triumphed on account of their unpleasantness: Bret Easton Ellis's "American Psycho" comes to mind. Its brutality was seen as a comment on the changing American reality of 20 years ago, and in consequence, many felt it important to have an opinion about the book. "The Dinner" is, to some extent, analogously culturally attuned, but attuned to a distinctly European society, one simultaneously more ostentatious in its apparent "civilization" and more ashamed of its underlying savagery. It will be interesting to see whether Paul Lohman's clandestine rage has the power to disconcert a nation already bathed in the blood of mass shootings. The novel's claustrophobic premise is the gathering of two couples for dinner in a high-end restaurant in Amsterdam. The book is divided up by courses, and we will come to know everything that the four people eat and drink (or don't). Much is made of the pretensions of the establishment and the preposterousness of its food. ("The first thing that struck you about Claire's plate was its vast emptiness. Of course, I'm well aware that, in the better restaurants, quality takes precedence over quantity, but you have voids and then you have voids. The void here, that part of the plate on which no food at all was present, had clearly been raised to a matter of principle.") Paul, one of the diners and our evening's guide, has little patience for such bourgeois nonsense, and initially his discontent may seem almost laudable, as a rejection of received standards, especially coupled as it is with apparent marital bliss ("I was looking at Claire, looking at my wife, probably with a loving gaze. ... I tightened my grip around her waist and sniffed: shampoo. Shampoo and something else, something warm - the smell of happiness, I thought") and manifest affection for his teenage son, Michel. This familial glow does not extend, however, to Paul and Claire's dining companions - Paul's older brother, Serge, and his wife, Babette. Serge is a highly successful politician, the opposition candidate in the coming national elections. (Paul, it should be noted, is a former high school history teacher, retired for medical reasons.) Paul finds everything about Serge repellent, from his handshake and his smile to his table manners and projected bedroom behavior: "I bet my brother ... stuffs himself into a woman in the same way he stuffs a beef croquette into his mouth." Even Serge and Babette's choice of holiday disgusts: "Every year, Serge and Babette went to their house in the Dordogne with the children. They belonged to that class of Dutch people who think everything French is 'great': from croissants to French bread with Camembert, from French cars (they themselves drove one of the top-end Peugeots) to French chansons and French films." Paul contrives to be dismissive even of their children, particularly of their third child, Beau, adopted from Burkina Faso - he seems to imply that the adoption was all but a publicity stunt. Paul's ranting about fashionable restaurants and politicians' naked ambition may stir pleasure in many a reader's misanthropic heart. Some reviews suggest it's possible, at first, to believe that Paul is clearheaded and sane, although this was at no time my experience. (Familiarity with the obsessive, unreliable narrators of Bernhard's fiction may be helpful in this regard.) But as we come to understand what has brought about this dinner, and what is at stake, it is impossible to continue to side with our narrator. This, then, is a novel that rests on the disclosure of secrets. At its center, there is the terrible crime committed by Paul and Claire's son, Michel, along with Serge and Babette's eldest, Rick. The violence is vividly described; in an ugly but all-tooplausible contemporary detail, a video of it has been uploaded to YouTube. But the crime is only one of the novel's twists. Koch's construction carefully manipulates his readers through a series of flashbacks and observations that will lead to a full, sinister apprehension of the unholy triad formed by Paul, Claire and Michel, the socalled happy family. Eventually, it's clear that the much maligned Serge, whatever his flaws, is the better man; but this doesn't mean he will triumph. TO build a novel around its secrets presents a structural challenge. Certainly, the promise of their unveiling compels the reader. But that compulsion can be hollow, and easily dissatisfied. (I found myself shamefacedly thinking, as I read about the boys' crime, Sure, it's bad, but I'd imagined something even worse! ) Attending to the secrets, we are less committed to their creators, the characters themselves. Koch endeavors to transcend this literary diminution by making Paul's personality the ultimate focus of the book. But here, too, he encounters a problem - of tidiness. In a strange, narratively conservative turn, we will come to believe that everything that has occurred can be explained neurologically. This takes away the characters' agency - they are merely acting out their prescribed fates - and in so doing, renders them significantly less interesting. Which, to return to a novel's first requirement - not that its characters be likable but that they be interesting - is a formally hazardous situation. In the end, it is Claire who emerges as the book's most intriguing figure. She is a willing and conscious participant in the acts and secrets perpetrated by the sick people around her, and yet as far as we know, is not herself "sick." It is through her role in egging on the others - something like that of the women in Federico García Lorca's "Blood Wedding" - that we might more clearly understand the societal flaws on which Koch intends to comment. But this isn't, ultimately, what interests the author. Rather, he has created a clever, dark confection, like some elegant dessert fashioned out of entrails. "The Dinner," absorbing and highly readable, proves in the end strangely shallow, and this may be the most unsettling thing about it. Claire Messud's new novel, "The Woman Upstairs," will be published next month. The book centers on a crime committed by two teenagers, a video of which has been uploaded to YouTube.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 10, 2013]

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Review by Booklist Review

Already a runaway hit throughout Europe, boasting more than a million copies sold, Koch's sixth novel arrives stateside, giving readers here a chance to mull over some rather meaty moral quandaries. But not so fast. First, Koch has a few false paths to lead us down. The story starts off casually and unassumingly with a dinner between two brothers, one running for prime minister of the Netherlands, along with their wives at one of Amsterdam's finest establishments. The other brother, as narrator, sharply ridicules every absurd element of the night to great effect. But just as everything settles in, Koch pivots, and these pointed laughs quickly turn to discussion about their teenage boys and something they've done. And it's at this point when readers will feel two distinct ideologies forming and will face the novel's vital question: which position to side with? Koch's organic style makes for a continuously engaging read that, if anything, leaves readers wanting more. Another 100 pages or so exploring these issues further would have been more than welcome, but what is here will no doubt stir some heady debates.--Bayer, Casey Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This chilling novel starts out as a witty look at contemporary manners in the style of Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage before turning into a take-no-prisoners psychological thriller. The Lohman brothers, unemployed teacher Paul and politician Serge, a candidate for prime minister, meet at an expensive Amsterdam restaurant, along with their respective spouses, Claire and Babette, to discuss a situation involving their respective 15-year-old sons, Michel and Rick. At first, the two couples discuss such pleasantries as wine and the new Woody Allen film. But during this five-course dinner, from aperitif to digestif, secrets come out that threaten relations between the two families. To say much more would spoil the breathtaking twists and turns of the plot, which slowly strips away layers of civility to expose the primal depths of supposedly model citizens, not to mention one character's past history of mental illness and violence. With dark humor, Koch dramatizes the lengths to which people will go to preserve a comfortable way of life. Despite a few too-convenient contrivances, this is a cunningly crafted thriller that will never allow you to look at a serviette in the same way again. Agent: Michael Carlisle, Inkwell Management. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Originally published in 2009, this best-selling Dutch novel is now available in English so the world can indulge in the dark comedy of award-winning author Koch (Save Us, Maria Montanelli). At an upscale restaurant in the Netherlands, two couples have dinner and a much-needed conversation about their sons. Koch employs the narrative frame of a menu (aperitif, appetizer) to slowly unveil how these couples know each other and the rippling effect their children's actions have caused. By the time dessert is served, the reader knows that the two men are brothers, and the narrative takes on Tolstoyan overtones, with each unhappy family unhappy in its own way. In a single setting, Koch successfully deploys multiple narratives of a single event to effectively show that our construction of history, and constant attempts at overdetermining the future, is problematic. VERDICT A shocking, humorous, and entertaining novel that effectively uses a misanthropic narrator in leading us through a fancy dinner, with morally savage undertones. Recommend for fans of Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage and Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap. [See Prepub Alert, 8/27/12.]-Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A high-class meal provides an unlikely window into privilege, violence and madness. Paul, the narrator of this caustic tale, initially appears to be an accomplished man who's just slightly eccentric and prone to condescension: As he and his wife prepare for a pricey dinner with his brother and sister-in-law, he rhetorically rolls his eyes at wait staff, pop culture and especially his brother, a rising star in the Dutch political world. The mood is mysteriously tense in the opening chapters, as the foursome talk around each other, and Paul's contempt expands. The source of the anxiety soon becomes evident: Paul's teenage son, along with Paul's brother's children, was involved in a violent incident, and though the videos circulating on TV and YouTube are grainy, there's a high risk they'll be identified. The formality of the meal is undone by the parents' desperate effort to keep a lid on the potential scandal: Sections are primly titled "Aperitif," "Appetizer" and so on, but Koch deliberately sends the narrative off-menu as it becomes clear that Paul's anxiety is more than just a modest personality tic, and the foursome's high-toned concerns about justice and egalitarianism collapse into unseemly self-interest. The novel can be ineffectually on the nose when it comes to discussions of white guilt and class, the brothers' wives are thin characters, and scenes meant to underscore Paul's madness have an unrealistic vibe that show Koch isn't averse to a gratuitous, melodramatic shock or two. Even so, Koch's slow revelation of the central crisis is expertly paced, and he's opened up a serious question of what parents owe their children, and how much of their character is passed on to them. At its best, a chilling vision of the ugliness of keeping up appearances.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 We were going out to dinner. I won't say which restaurant, because next time it might be full of people who've come to see whether we're there. Serge made the reservation. He's always the one who arranges it, the reservation. This particular restaurant is one where you have to call three months in advance--or six, or eight, don't ask me. Personally, I'd never want to know three months in advance where I'm going to eat on any given evening, but apparently some people don't mind. A few centuries from now, when historians want to know what kind of crazies people were at the start of the twenty-first century, all they'll have to do is look at the computer files of the so-called "top" restaurants. That information is kept on file--I happen to know that. If Mr. L. was prepared to wait three months for a window seat last time, then this time he'll wait for five months for a table beside the men's room--that's what restaurants call "customer relations management." Serge never reserves a table three months in advance. Serge makes the reservation on the day itself--he says he thinks of it as a sport. You have restaurants that reserve a table for people like Serge Lohman, and this restaurant happens to be one of them. One of many, I should say. It makes you wonder whether there isn't one restaurant in the whole country where they don't go faint right away when they hear the name Serge Lohman on the phone. He doesn't make the call himself, of course; he lets his secretary or one of his assistants do that. "Don't worry about it," he told me when I talked to him a few days ago. "They know me there; I can get us a table." All I'd asked was whether it wasn't a good idea to call, in case they were full, and where we would go if they were. At the other end of the line, I thought I heard something like pity in his voice. I could almost see him shake his head. It was a sport. There was one thing I didn't feel like that evening. I didn't feel like being there when the owner or on-duty manager greeted Serge Lohman as though he were an old friend. Like seeing how the waitress would lead him to the nicest table on the side facing the garden, or how Serge would act as though he had it all coming to him--that deep down he was still an ordinary guy, and that was why he felt entirely comfortable among other ordinary people. Which was precisely why I'd told him we would meet in the restaurant itself and not, as he'd suggested, at the cafe around the corner. It was a cafe where a lot of ordinary people went. How Serge Lohman would walk in there like a regular guy, with a grin that said that all those ordinary people should above all go on talking and act as though he wasn't there--I didn't feel like that, either. 2 The restaurant is only a few blocks from our house, so we walked. That also brought us past the cafe where I hadn't wanted to meet Serge. I had my arm around my wife's waist; her hand was tucked somewhere inside my coat. The sign outside the cafe was lit with the warm red-and-white colors of the brand of beer they had on tap. "We're too early," I said to my wife. "I mean, if we go now, we'll be right on time." "My wife." I should stop calling her that. Her name is Claire. Her parents named her Marie Claire, but in time Claire didn't feel like sharing her name with a magazine. Sometimes I call her Marie, just to tease her. But I rarely refer to her as "my wife"--on official occasions sometimes, or in sentences like "My wife can't come to the phone right now," or "My wife is very sure she asked for a room with a sea view." On evenings like this, Claire and I make the most of the moments when it's still just the two of us. Then it's as though everything is still up for grabs, as though the dinner date were only a misunderstanding, as though it's just the two of us out on the town. If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be this: happiness needs nothing but itself, it doesn't have to be validated. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" is the opening sentence of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. All I could hope to add to that is that unhappy families--and within those families, in particular the unhappy husband and wife--can never get by on their own. The more validators, the merrier. Unhappiness loves company. Unhappiness can't stand silence--especially not the uneasy silence that settles in when it is all alone. So when the bartender at the cafe put our beers down in front of us, Claire and I smiled at each other in the knowledge that we would soon be spending an entire evening in the company of the Lohmans--in the knowledge that this was the finest moment of that evening, that from here on it would all be downhill. I didn't feel like going to the restaurant. I never do. A fixed appointment for the immediate future is the gates of hell; the actual evening is hell itself. It starts in front of the mirror in the morning: what you're going to wear, and whether or not you're going to shave. At times like these, after all, everything is a statement, a pair of torn and stained jeans as much as a neatly ironed shirt. If you don't scrape off the day's stubble, you were too lazy to shave; two days' beard immediately makes them wonder whether this is some new look; three days or more is just a step from total dissolution. "Are you feeling all right? You're not sick, are you?" No matter what you do, you're not free. You shave, but you're not free. Shaving is a statement as well. Apparently you found this evening significant enough to go to the trouble of shaving, you see the others thinking--in fact, shaving already puts you behind 1-0. And then I always have Claire to remind me that this isn't an evening like every other. Claire is smarter than I am. I'm not saying that out of some half-baked feminist sentiment or in order to endear women to me. You'll never hear me claim that "women in general" are smarter than men. Or more sensitive, more intuitive, that they are more "in touch with life" or any of the other horseshit that, when all is said and done, so-called "sensitive" men try to peddle more often than women themselves. Claire just happens to be smarter than I am; I can honestly say that it took me a while to admit that. During our first years together, I thought she was intelligent, I guess, but intelligent in the usual sense: precisely as intelligent, in fact, as you might expect my wife to be. After all, would I settle for a stupid woman for any longer than a month? In any case, Claire was intelligent enough for me to stay with her even after the first month. And now, almost twenty years later, that hasn't changed. So Claire is smarter than I am, but on evenings like this, she still asks my opinion about what she should wear, which earrings, whether to wear her hair up or leave it down. For women, earrings are sort of what shaving is for men: the bigger the earrings, the more significant, the more festive, the evening. Claire has earrings for every occasion. Some people might say it's not smart to be so insecure about what you wear. But that's not how I see it. The stupid woman is the one who thinks she doesn't need any help. What does a man know about things like that? the stupid woman thinks, and proceeds to make the wrong choice. I've sometimes tried to imagine Babette asking Serge whether she's wearing the right dress. Whether her hair isn't too long. What Serge thinks of these shoes. The heels aren't too flat, are they? Or maybe too high? But whenever I do I realize there's something wrong with the picture, something that seems unimaginable: "No, it's fine, it's absolutely fine," I hear Serge say. But he's not really paying attention. It doesn't actually interest him, and besides, even if his wife were to wear the wrong dress, all the men would still turn their heads as she walked by. Everything looks good on her. So what's she moaning about? This wasn't a hip cafe; the fashionable types didn't come here--it wasn't cool, Michel would say. Ordinary people were by far in the majority. Not the particularly young or the particularly old--in fact, a little bit of everything all thrown together, but above all ordinary. The way a cafe should be. It was crowded. We stood close together, beside the door to the men's room. Claire was holding her beer in one hand; with the fingers of the other she was gently squeezing my wrist. "I don't know," she said, "but I've had the impression recently that Michel is acting strange. Well, not really strange, but different. Distant. Haven't you noticed?" "Oh yeah?" I said. "I guess it's possible." I had to be careful not to look at Claire--we know each other too well for that--my eyes would give me away. Instead, I behaved as though I were looking around the cafe, as though I were deeply interested in the spectacle of ordinary people involved in lively conversation. I was relieved that I'd stuck to my guns, that we wouldn't be meeting the Lohmans until we reached the restaurant; in my mind's eye I could see Serge coming through the swinging doors, his grin encouraging the regulars above all to go on with what they were doing and pay no attention to him. "He hasn't said anything to you?" Claire asked. "I mean, you two talk about other things. Do you think it might have something to do with a girl? Something he'd feel easier telling you about?" Just then the door to the men's room opened and we had to step to one side, pressed even closer together. I felt Claire's beer glass clink against mine. "Do you think it has something to do with girls?" she asked again. If only that were true, I couldn't help thinking. Something to do with girls . . . wouldn't that be wonderful, wonderfully normal, the normal adolescent mess. "Can Chantal/Merel/Rose spend the night?" "Do her parents know? If Chantal's/Merel's/Rose's parents think it's okay, it's okay with us. As long as you remember . . . as long as you're careful when you . . . ah, you know what I mean . . . I don't have to tell you about that anymore. Right? Michel?" Girls came to our house often enough, each one prettier than the next. They sat on the couch or at the kitchen table and greeted me politely when I came home. "Hello, Mr. Lohman." "You don't have to call me Mr. Lohman. Just call me Paul." And so they would call me "Paul" a few times, but a couple of days later it would be back to "Mr. Lohman" again. Sometimes I would get one of them on the phone, and while I asked if I could take a message for Michel, I would shut my eyes and try to connect the girl's voice at the other end of the line (they rarely mentioned their names, just plunged right in: "Is Michel there?") with a face. "No, that's okay, Mr. Lohman. It's just that his cell phone is switched off, so I thought I'd try this number." A couple of times, when I came in unannounced, I'd had the impression that I'd caught them at something, Michel and Chantal/Merel/Rose: that they were watching The Fabulous Life on MTV less innocently than they wanted me to think--that they'd been fiddling with each other, that they'd rushed to straighten their clothes and hair when they heard me coming. Something about the flush on Michel's cheeks--something heated, I told myself. To be honest, though, I had no idea. Maybe nothing was going on at all, maybe all those pretty girls just saw my son as a good friend: a nice, rather handsome boy, someone they could show up with at a party--a boy they could trust, precisely because he wasn't the kind who wanted to fiddle with them right away. "No, I don't think it's got anything to do with a girl," I said, looking Claire straight in the eye now. That's the oppressive thing about happiness, the way everything is out on the table like an open book: if I avoided looking at her any longer, she'd know for sure that something was going on--with girls, or worse. "I think it's more like something with school," I said. "He's just done those exams; I think he's tired. I think he underestimated it a little, how tough his sophomore year would be." Did that sound believable? And above all: did I look believable when I said it? Claire's gaze shifted quickly back and forth between my right and my left eye; then she raised her hand to my shirt collar, as though there were something out of place there that could be dealt with now, so I wouldn't look like an idiot when we got to the restaurant. She smiled and placed the flat of her hand against my chest; I could feel two fingertips against my skin, right where the top button of my shirt was unbuttoned. "Maybe that's it," she said. "I just think we both have to be careful that at a certain point he doesn't stop talking about things. That we get used to that, I mean." "No, of course. But at his age, he kind of has a right to his own secrets. We shouldn't try to find out everything about him--then maybe he'd clam up altogether." I looked Claire in the eye. My wife, I thought at that moment. Why shouldn't I call her my wife? My wife. I put my arm around her and pulled her close. Even if only for the duration of this evening. My wife and I, I said to myself. My wife and I would like to see the wine list. "What are you laughing about?" Claire said. My wife said. I looked at our beer glasses. Mine was empty; hers was still three-quarters full. As usual. My wife didn't drink as fast as I did, which was another reason why I loved her, this evening perhaps more than other evenings. "Nothing," I said. "I was thinking . . . I was thinking about us." Excerpted from The Dinner by Herman Koch All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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