Het Diner (edition 2009)

MINOR SPOILERS!!

Paul and Claire Lohman are meeting Paul’s brother Serge and Serge’s wife Babette at an expensive restaurant. The evening starts off normally enough, but it becomes clear that the meeting is more than just a social engagement. The teenage sons of the two couples have been caught on CCTV, committing a horrific offence, and while they have not yet been publicly identified, their parents have recognised their children as the perpetrators, and have met to decide what to do. Serge is concerned about the effect it will have on his own future, as he is a popular candidate to be the next Prime Minister, and all four are concerned about the futures of their sons.

The premise of this book fascinated me, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, although I felt that some parts were somewhat unrealistic. The story is narrated by Paul, who, it becomes clear, has significant anger management problems, which may be genetic, and which he may have passed on to their son Michel. As he described the restaurant with disdain (understandable at times), he also described the events that had led up to the discovery of his son’s crime, and talks about things in the family’s past.

All four characters, with the possible exception of Babette, were to me, extremely unlikeable. Initially I liked Claire a lot, but towards the end of the book her actions become perhaps unbelievable, and certainly inexcusable. Neither she nor Paul seems particularly horrified by their son’s actions, and in fact seem determined to cover them up and excuse them by any means necessary.

The over-riding thing that I noticed about the story was how many secrets the characters kept from each other, and even from the reader. This became clearer the further I read. The writing was insidious – it got under my skin and I genuinely found this book hard to put down; there is a kind of sinister undertone running through it. At first, the narration is innocuous – you might even say banal – with Paul talking about the things that irritated him about the pretentious restaurant they are eating in, but then things take a turn, and we are plunged into something much more shocking.

I’m not sure that the ending was one I liked, but it was certainly one that I didn’t expect, and it is a book which I continue to think about. I can imagine that it may polarise readers, but I would certainly recommend it. ( )

I was rather surprised at how much I loved this little book. The plot revolves around Paul and his wife Claire having dinner at a fancy restaurant with Paul's brother Serge, a candidate for prime minister and his wife Babette. The book is divided up into the courses the couples are served. At first every thing starts out innocuous enough. Banal topics are discussed and over priced food is served and resented. As the night goes on however the conversation takes an ugly turn and it becomes clear that the families have gathered to discuss a shared family secret, let the nastiness begin!

I get the Gone Girl comparisons. Gone Girl exposes the diseased underside of a seemingly perfect marriage while in this book you have two families who seem to have it all to the outside but within is some seriously corrupted DNA. Without hopefully giving too much away I would put this book with We Need to Talk About Kevin and Defending Jacob. This is a Dutch book and I loved the writing and the way the characters speak. Anyone familiar with the Millennium Trilogy will be right at home with the writing. ( )

This is a nasty book about nasty people. I read it straight through, but if you want somebody to root for, you will probably be disappointed. ( )

Excellent book. The best one that i have read recently. The twist at the end is incredible, makes for an 'out with a bang'. ( )

Spoilers
At first this seemed to me to be a really inconsequential book. There was so much repetition in the way it was told and the focus for the first part was on such dull things as the restauranteur’s pinky, mentioned again and again. It was meant to be an amusing motif but I just found it as dull as the observations about how little food there was on massive plates. Yes, restaurants are often like this but I don’t think this sort of observation makes for an entertaining book, especially when Koch uses his narrator to make all his criticisms directly. It’s as if the reader is being lectured.

Still, having started the book I pressed on, just as Koch has his narrator say when wondering why Babette stayed so long with her husband, an up and coming politician about, possibly, to become Prime Minister – ‘it would have been a waste of all the time she had invested to stop now: the way you don’t put aside a bad book when you’re halfway through it, you finish it reluctantly’. I’m wondering, too, about the translation from the Dutch. Has this reduced its effectiveness? I guess inevitably well written books will suffer when the author’s choice of words is replaced by something foreign. Here, though, it seems a clumsy translation in places. For example, we find this: ‘regular people were earning large sums of money off of him’ – ‘off of’? What sort of illiteracy is this?

Certainly the book became more substantial when it came to discovering that Michel had taken to beating up vagrants and had killed one, but I had two reactions. The first was that the narrator and Claire both responded unrealistically to what their son had done. There didn’t seem to be any horror that he had enjoyed such a violent crime and it was all protection with Claire particularly odd with her doting behaviour towards Michel. Surely a parent at the very least would remonstrate with their delinquent offspring?

I guess that leads on to my second criticism and that is that Koch aims to hold the reader’s interest by withholding information, not just withholding what his psychological illness is and which he passed on to his son but also what was wrong with Claire. By being vague here he loses some credibility – and it all seems tweely coy. My real objection, though, is to the way we left wondering all the time what’s going on. Why does Serge want to talk to Paul? What is the great problem Paul has with his son that threatens his happiness? Koch gradually reveals these things but if he’s writing from the viewpoint of a narrator, I think the reader should know what he knows. Basically Koch just seems to be offering teasers.

Part way through I felt what also put me off this book was the character of the narrator, an ugly person, continually finding fault with the restaurant and his brother, not to mention his own job and his desire to punch the principal when it’s clear he’s gone overboard, though, in typical fashion, he’s ‘not going to say’ what he told the girl about her inadequate essay. I think the reader needs to identify with a character to at least empathise with one of them in order to get really involved in a book. With this one I just felt left out completely. I wondered how Koch expected the reader to respond to Paul. How did he want us to feel when Paul smashes the red hot macaroni pan into his brother’s face and follows it up with a punch and only stops bringing the pan down on his face when his son comes in. How did he expect us to feel when Paul thinks a waiter has ‘every right to slam his fist right into their inquisitive, spoiled mouths, knuckles hard against the front teeth, breaking them off close to the root’ if a customer asks what’s the difference between tagliatelle and spaghetti? I simply saw him as a man with significant anger management problems and whether they were the result of an unexplained psychological illness or not and whether he’d passed this onto his son or not, I was simply not engaged at all with such characters.

Having finished the novel, I realise that Koch deliberately had in mind to make his narrator ugly and to gradually reveal this along with his wife’s criminal violence and his son’s continued violence. For me, though, this didn’t work. It’s not that it can’t work but the way Koch wrote this so that at no time did I feel anything positive towards Paul, despite his reasonable (but bland) observations about expensive restaurants, made me feel just sidelined and critical. In comparison, Theroux in ‘The Mosquito Coast’ manages wonderfully to engage the reader in the disintegrating character of Allie Fox, a man driven by society into more and more extreme behaviour so that the reader has really ambiguous feelings towards him. In other words, Theroux engages the reader at the start, something Koch never does. ( )