Dutch Psycho

The Dinner, a novel by Herman Koch (2012)

I was first impressed and absorbed by the characters of this novel, the couples Paul and Claire, and Paul's brother Serge and his wife Babette. It's a dinner at a very expensive restaurant, and that doesn't sound eventful, but it is. Koch reveals the underlying drama slowly, manipulating us to keep turning the pages. And I did. Once we realize that their children, the cousins, have done something criminally terrible, I was turning the pages even faster.

At a certain point, Koch reveals that Paul and Claire are not just morally complex people -- they're practically monsters, actively concealing and rationalizing the work of their son with the cool of a Nazi bureaucrat. It turns out that Serge, the famous liberal politician, and the butt of Serge's narrative, is the only one here with a conscience and any sense of right and wrong. Two thirds of the way through, I understood that Paul is a violent psychotic. Claire is right behind him. Their son is a violent weirdo.

It's finally confusing and frustrating. We have to believe in Koch's compartmentalization of the characters' actions. Can these human beings who form an affectionate "happy family" engage in evil only in small instances? I suppose if they are mentally, clinically sick, the could. But even the main narrator, in his thoughts and actions, is quite clear in his understanding of the world -- he does grasp reality, as when he lampoons the work of the restaurant host and waitresses. We just suddenly get these acts of blind violence in which he seems disconnected from reality. I just didn't feel they were real humans any more, but concoctions of the author.

It didn't help that there were some strange incongruities at the heart of the novel -- would Serge, a famous man, want to talk about their sons, with all the attendant yelling and crying, in a restaurant, surrounded by other diners? How is it that a man who is manifestly criminally violent and psychotic (he's put innocent people in the hospital) has not been jailed? He seems to suffer no punishment (unless that's Koch's point about the laxness of Dutch society and the justice system). How is it that no one else has recognized the boys from the online videos?