{"id":2290,"date":"2012-08-17T05:59:42","date_gmt":"2012-08-17T05:59:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=2290"},"modified":"2012-09-01T06:24:18","modified_gmt":"2012-09-01T06:24:18","slug":"the-dinner-by-herman-koch-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=2290","title":{"rendered":"The Dinner by Herman Koch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Atlantic Books 2 August 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

352 pp, trade paperback, \u00a312.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Lesley Glaister<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Paul, resentful brother of the more famous Serge, is the narrator of The Dinner<\/em>, Dutch writer Herman Koch\u2019s sixth novel.\u00a0 It takes place over one evening as the brothers and their wives meet in an incongruously fashionable restaurant with a grim and serious purpose: to discuss how they should deal with their fifteen-year-old sons who have collaborated in a cruel and callous crime.\u00a0 Their misdeed has been caught on camera and made its way onto YouTube, and the family knows that it can only be a matter of time before the boys will be identified and several lives \u2013 and one potentially glittering political career \u2013 are shattered by the consequences.<\/p>\n

Adroitly intercut with flashback, the novel is structured round the \u2018acts\u2019 of the meal: Aperitif, Appetizer \u2013 right through to Digestiv, and Koch enjoys mocking the pretensions of the restaurant where the provenance of every ingredient in each artistically sparse course is supplied by the ma\u00eetre d\u2019: \u2018The crayfish are dressed in a vinaigrette of tarragon and baby green onions \u2026 And these are chanterelles from the Voges.\u2019<\/p>\n

At first the novel is rather fun. Koch catches the dynamics between siblings and spouses with a deft wit \u2013 the little marital struggle over who gets to face the wall and who to watch the room in a restaurant, for instance, and the tiny shifts of expression that can signal so much to one\u2019s other half.\u00a0\u00a0 There\u2019s a hilarious set piece in a Gents where Paul is paralyzed with envy at the \u2018steady, powerful jet of urine\u2019 produced by the man beside him at the urinal.<\/p>\n

At first, Paul\u2019s narration is comically unreliable; his envy of his well-heeled and successful politician brother seems farcically exaggerated: he\u2019s unable to admit to liking a Woody Allen film because his brother pronounces it a masterpiece, and won\u2019t order the same food as Serge in case he seems to be under his influence and thus ends up with goat\u2019s cheese \u2013 which he loathes.\u00a0 This sibling rivalry drives him to violent fantasies, which as they seem so ridiculously out of proportion, are funny at first\u2026<\/p>\n

But this is a novel that misleads, that cleverly turns itself inside out, so that what seems funny, a quirky comedy of manners, soon turns very black indeed, and the comic unreliability something much more serious, complex and intentional than it at first appears.<\/p>\n

The Dinner<\/em>, so deceptively light, at least initially, is packed with serious themes: class; snobbery; political insincerity; fame; sibling rivalry; mental illness; inter-racial adoption; racism and \u2013 something that arises from the teenagers\u2019 crime \u2013 parental culpability.\u00a0 In this last respect I was reminded of Lionel Shriver\u2019s We Need to Talk About Kevin<\/em> and this book turns similarly chilling as we become acquainted with more detail of the dynamics between Paul and his son.\u00a0 We also discover that Paul is suffering from an un-named hereditary mental disorder \u2013 and so the question of whether his son is similarly affected arises too.<\/p>\n

This is a good read, a clever and entertaining book that teases by setting up and then dashing expectation after expectation.\u00a0 I felt a series of rugs being pulled out under my feet \u2013 and to mangle the metaphor, had to work hard to stay on my toes.\u00a0 The Dinner<\/em> is a tragi-comedy of middle-class pretension, manners \u2013 and, well, dinner, that while it fascinates may well leave you with a sour taste in your mouth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Lesley Glaister<\/p>\n

At first, Paul\u2019s narration is comically unreliable; his envy of his well-heeled and successful politician brother seems farcically exaggerated: he\u2019s unable to admit to liking a Woody Allen film because his brother pronounces it a masterpiece, and won\u2019t order the same food as Serge in case he seems to be under his influence and thus ends up with goat\u2019s cheese \u2013 which he loathes. This sibling rivalry drives him to violent fantasies, which as they seem so ridiculously out of proportion, are funny at first\u2026[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2290"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2422,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2290\/revisions\/2422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}