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Summary
Summary
"A European Gone Girl ." -- The Wall Street Journal
An internationally bestselling phenomenon: the darkly suspenseful, highly controversial tale of two families struggling to make the hardest decision of their lives -- all over the course of one meal.
It's a summer's evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse -- the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.
Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children. As civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple show just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.
Tautly written, incredibly gripping, and told by an unforgettable narrator, The Dinner promises to be the topic of countless dinner party debates. Skewering everything from parenting values to pretentious menus to political convictions, this novel reveals the dark side of genteel society and asks what each of us would do in the face of unimaginable tragedy.
Author Notes
Herman Koch was born in Arnhem, Netherlands on September 5, 1953. He is an author and actor. His has written several novels and short story collections including De Voorbijganger, Eten Met Emma, Denken aan Bruce Kennedy, and Summer House with Swimming Pool. The Dinner won the Publieksprijs Prize in 2009. He is an actor for radio, television, and film. He co-created the long-running TV series Jiskefet, which ran from 1990 to 2005.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
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.
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
New York Review of Books 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.
Guardian Review
Herman Koch's The Dinner is, like Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap, a novel whose premise can be neatly reduced. Two couples meet in a fancy restaurant in Amsterdam to discuss an outrage perpetrated by their sons. As the evening progresses, civilised behaviour breaks down, revealing that the parents are not so different from their children. Roman Polanski's 2011 film Carnage covers similar territory; the urbane, liberal sheen is quickly rubbed off two sets of New York parents when they meet to discuss a fight between their sons. In The Dinner, although the boys may be products of their parents, they come from two very different families, and the grotesqueness revealed in the novel is of a different order. The boys' fathers, Paul and Serge Lohman, are brothers. The narrator, Paul, is a teacher "placed on non-active", while Serge is a charismatic politician in the running for Holland's premiership. The book is divided into courses, and during the aperitif and appetiser it's hard not to side with Paul's assessment that his richer, better looking, more popular brother is overly smooth, insincere and sexist. Many readers will be inclined to meet Paul halfway on this; after all, even when we're voting for them, who really trusts a politician? Paul's voice is initially beguiling. He describes Serge's rural retreat in France as having "a whiff of Boursin imitation cheese that had nothing to do with French cheese". But as the novel progresses on to the main course, it becomes increasingly clear that Paul's jibes may not simply be attempts to puncture his brother's hypocrisy. What qualifies him to label Serge a hypocrite? For instance, there is nothing except Paul's insistence that Serge and his wife do not really love their adopted son Beau as much as they love their biological children. The differences between the brothers might suggest that nature and nurture are equally irrelevant, but family bonds are important to Paul. His intense love for his only son Michel is matched by the devotion he feels for his wife Claire. Three-legged structures are the strongest, and together the trio are solid. When Michel and his cousin commit their terrible act, Paul and Claire are forced to decide where their loyalties lie. Are they confined to their small family unit or do they extend to the human family, society? Will the couple sacrifice one for the good of the other? Paul recognises the liberal values professed by his country and his politician brother. He understands the unfairness of sexism and racism and has no problem with homosexuality. Paul is also empathetic, up to a point. He remembers how the face of a schoolchild to whom he said something unrepeatable "broke down the middle. Like a vase. Or like a glass that shatters at a high pitched note", but it gradually becomes clear that Paul's keen sense of observation and tendency to analyse others are symptoms of his own dislocation. For Paul is a violent man who needs medication to control his impulses. Koch paces his revelations expertly, and there are twists and turns enough to keep us reading, but his decision to ascribe the former teacher's violent outbreaks to a biological defect to make Paul's condition something other than simply the human condition diminishes the book. Paul is clearly not "one of us", whoever "we" may be. But The Dinner is more than its plot, and Paul's voice, combined with his knowledge of his own flawed personality, has the potential to sustain the novel without the drama of the two boys' transgressions and their parents' divided responses. Near the beginning of the novel, Paul quotes the opening sentence of Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." By the end of the novel, he has disproved the theory. His own happy family is unique, but happiness isn't everything. Louise Welsh's The Girl on the Stairs is published by John Murray.
Kirkus 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.
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.