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.(Kirkus
Reviews, December 1, 2012)
READING GUIDE FROM NOVELISTPLUS
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The Dinner
by Herman Koch
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Summary
Note: Those
who have not read this novel might want to avoid reading the summary and
questions, since they necessarily reveal plot elements that the reader may
prefer to encounter as surprises.
In The Dinner, two couples meet for a meal at a fashionable restaurant in Amsterdam to have a
difficult conversation. Paul Lohman, who narrates the story, is dreading the
appointment he and his wife, Claire, have with Paul’s brother, Serge, and
Serge’s wife, Babette—Paul would prefer a simple plate of ribs at
the cafe around the corner to the elaborate, multicourse meal his politician
brother has suggested. But the couples need to talk, and Serge has suggested
the restaurant.
As the meal progresses, Paul narrates
it in obsessive detail, from the pretentious mannerisms of the maitre d’
who attends their table, to the pink champagne and olives served as an
aperitif, to the absurdly small servings. Paul is aggressively critical of the
pretentiousness of the restaurant, with its minute descriptions of every
element of the food, and of Serge’s pretentiousness in selecting it.
As the dinner conversation meanders
on, lapsing into polite small talk and awkward silences, Paul’s mind
wanders. He fantasizes about his sister-in-law, wondering why she looked as if
she’d been crying when Serge and Babette arrived; ponders his
brother’s animalistic desires; and thinks about his teenage son, Michel,
and the secret he and Michel share. He thinks about the disturbing video he
found on Michel’s phone earlier that day and considers whether the girls
who visit Michel are his girlfriends.
In the middle of the dinner, he
realizes that he has picked up Michel’s phone rather than his own.
Reviewing Michel’s messages, he discovers that Michel and Claire also
have secrets—she has promised they will not be home before midnight, to
allow Michel time, though she does not say for what, only that “you two
have to do it tonight.” He is certain that the message is related to
Michel’s recent behavior, but he does not know how. He and Michel meet in
the park outside the restaurant to exchange phones, but Michel won’t tell
him what’s going on.
As dessert is served, Serge
introduces the reason for this uncomfortable meeting: Michel and Rick (Serge
and Babette's son) have set fire to a homeless woman they found sleeping in
front of an ATM machine. The crime has shocked the country, but police cannot
identify the perpetrators from the fuzzy surveillance video they have. Only the
boys’ parents know that Michel and Rick are the guilty parties. They have
met this evening to decide how to handle what they refer to as “the
incident.”
Paul, Claire, and Babette are
all in favor of protecting the boys, preserving their futures, but Serge thinks
they should come forward and plans to abandon his campaign for prime minister
so that he can support Rick. When even Babette can’t dissuade her husband
from what they all feel is a rash decision, Paul and Claire are pushed to
action. Paul can’t do what he’d like to—he knows that the
psychiatric diagnosis he received after his dismissal from the school would
immediately make him a suspect—but Claire can, and will, to protect her
son’s future.
Before the night is over, Serge
is violently silenced, and the boys’ secret is saved, but the threat of
their violence lingers.
Questions
This guide
provides questions and answers, but they are not the only possible questions
and answers. Readers bring their own personalities to books. Some readers see
different things, some have different responses to characters, and some have
different ideas about what the story means. The variety of possible answers is
one of the reasons we find book discussions such a rewarding activity. These
questions and answers should be used to begin a discussion, not to replace the
readers’ own responses to the novel.
What is the significance of the novel’s setting?
The
Dinner takes place during a dinner, but not just any dinner—this is a
multicourse meal at a restaurant so trendy that most people wait months for
reservations. In some ways it’s an odd choice: It’s a very public
place for a very private conversation, a point reinforced by the intrusion of
Serge’s public persona into events, first in his showy entrance into the
restaurant and then in another diner’s request for a picture with him.
And the parade of courses, from aperitif to appetizer to entree to dessert,
disrupts the flow of conversation, eliminating any possibility of a serious,
sustained discussion.
But a
restaurant is not entirely a public space; in some ways, it can be seen as a
collection of very private spaces, demarcated by the individual tables. A diner
may leave briefly to use the restroom or step outside, but that places him in a
public space. There is, simply, no real escape from the space of the table. The
four participants are essentially trapped with each other in that bubble of
privacy. That sense of entrapment raises the emotional stakes of the
discussion, heightening the tension. It is that tension that leads to the
violent denouement, the assault on Serge (which, ironically, takes place
outside of the restaurant, at the cafe around the corner).
The
restaurant setting also engages another set of contrasts that are thematically
important to the novel. The restaurant is itself hyper-civilized. The mannered
descriptions of the food, the fussy service, the fawning of the staff indicate
a level of sophistication that suggests a kind of decadence—akin to Rome
on the cusp of its fall. As the meal proceeds, the diners engage in the kind of
polite small talk that usually accompanies such meals—discussions of the
new Woody Allen film and summers in France.
But the
couples have come to this icon of civilization to deal with an act of brutal
cruelty. The sophistication and politesse of the setting masks a fundamental
savagery, not only in the boys, but also in the adults discussing them. With
the exception of Serge, the adults all try to render the crime abstract,
obscuring the human life at its center. It’s not a murder, Claire
insists, but “an accident . . . an unfortunate series of events”
(p. 231); Babette calls the crime an “incident” that “we have
to keep in perspective” (p. 233). The tragedy of the crime is not that an
innocent woman was killed, or that homeless people have no safe place to sleep,
but that the boys’ future may be ruined. It is an act of radical
dehumanization, every bit as brutal as the murder itself.
How does Paul’s narrative voice affect the
reader’s experience of the story?
First-person
narrators, made untrustworthy by generations of unreliable narrators who
implicate their readers in their own delusions and lies, are notoriously problematic
for readers. Paul is, at first glance, not one of these. He is quite
forthcoming with the facts of his son’s crime, as well as the details of
his own violent past. He is candid about his distaste for the evening ahead,
expressing a disdain for trendy haunts and his brother’s public persona
that some might find refreshing—this is a man not swayed by the fickle
tides of public approval. And many parents of teenagers will sympathize with
his uncertainty about how much privacy to allow Michel. Even if there is
something odd or awkward in his presentation, we’re naturally tempted to
sympathize with Paul and his view of things.
Paul’s
general misanthropy is pretty quickly revealed, however, and it builds through
the narrative, from a source of discomfort to the reader to true horror.
Beginning with his assertion that the evening with Serge and Babette will be
“hell itself” (p. 6), readers gradually become aware that what
seems like an off-putting disdain for people in general is in fact a murderous
hatred—for the headmaster of the school where he taught, for
Michel’s school principal, for the Dutch people as a whole, for his
brother. Even before he reveals that he has been diagnosed with a mental
illness, it becomes impossible for most readers to share his assessment of
events.
But the
reader has no escape, other than to close the book. The book is relentlessly
first person, and it is central to Paul’s character that he is incapable
of seeing events from any perspective but his own. No other perspective is
available, so the reader is forced to see the action of the book through
Paul’s eyes, however distasteful that view may be. It makes for a most
uncomfortable experience, especially as events move toward a violent climax.
Why is Paul so repulsed by his brother?
Paul’s
dislike of Serge is evident from the beginning of the novel; his distaste for
Serge’s public persona, for what Paul sees as an ongoing performance, is
undeniable. He is annoyed by Serge’s wine hobby and repulsed by his unthinking
animal appetites, his methodical, efficient approach to eating: “And when
we would finally find a place to eat, it was never a pretty sight. He would eat
the way one fills the tank with gas: he would devour his cheese sandwich with
white bread or his almond cake quickly and efficiently, to make sure the fuel
reached his stomach as soon as possible” (p. 53). He imagines his brother
in bed with Babette, sure “that he stuffs himself into a woman in the
same way he stuffs a beef croquette into his mouth” (p. 54).
The basis
of Paul’s disgust for his brother seems to be the evident gap between
what he knows of Serge in private and Serge’s public persona. He is
frankly amazed by the difference:
It is surprising and amazing to behold how my
brother—the oaf, the lumpen boor who “has to eat now” and
scarfs down his tournedos joylessly in three bites, the easily bored dullard
whose eyes wander at every subject that doesn’t have to do with him—how
this brother of mine on a podium and in the spotlights and on TV literally
begins to shine—how, in other words, he becomes a politician with
charisma. (p. 98)
Paul may be
disgusted by his brother’s boorishness, but he is as much intrigued as disgusted
by his duality, by his inauthenticity.
In reality,
Paul’s dismissive disdain for Serge is an attempt to gloss over his own
horror at Serge’s willingness to allow others to define him in this way.
For Paul, “A fixed appointment for the immediate future is the gates of
hell; the actual evening is hell itself,” because “everything is a
statement,” from what you choose to wear to whether you shave or not.
“No matter what you do, you’re not free” (p. 6)—there
is no escaping the judgment of others. If Paul feels himself trapped by the judgment
of others, how much more so must Serge be? Worse, Serge actually embraces the
power of others to define him, making a career of conforming to the
expectations of his public. From Paul’s point of view, his brother has,
in fact, embraced hell, making himself not only the subject of public scrutiny
but a product of it.
Are Paul’s judgments of Serge and Babette accurate?
Paul
dismisses Serge and Babette as examples of the worst kind of pretentiousness,
motivated only by the exigencies of Serge’s political career and the
currents of popular culture. Everything about them, from Serge’s wine
hobby to the family’s adoption of an African boy, is inauthentic, merely
part of an attempt to construct an image of Serge that will win him the next
election. Their tastes are dull examples of Dutch parochialism, and Serge himself
is basically stupid, driven alternately by his base appetites and by his
political instincts, reveling in the petty advantages imparted by his status as
a political celebrity, making a game of requesting same-day reservations at the
most popular restaurants and enjoying the fuss that arises at his (inevitably
late) arrival.
Paul seems
to hint that if there is any hope for the couple, it resides in Babette, who is
much smarter than her husband. It is she who lavishes love on Beau, their
adopted son, and insists that Rick, the couple’s older son, treat him
gently. Her wry skepticism about Serge’s sudden interest in wine
connoisseurship suggests that she is at least aware of her husband’s
fundamental shallowness. She cannot completely escape the taint of being
Serge’s wife, but Paul is certain she is somehow better than Serge,
providing a solid foundation for her husband’s crass ambitions.
Paul’s
judgment of his brother pervades the novel from its first pages; it is, it must
be admitted, supported by Paul’s depiction of his brother’s
behavior at the dinner. Serge seems to be the stereotypical politician, his
head populated only by talking points and slogans, his dreams only of the next
election. His conversation is at times crude and his table manners perfunctory
at best; his wife is clearly his “better half.” Readers are tempted
to dismiss him, as Paul dismisses him, as a type incapable of real
individuality. As a result, Serge’s emergence as the lone moral voice
among the four is a bit jolting. Babette is firmly on Claire and Paul’s
side, eager to dismiss “the incident” and move on with
life—and all too willing to assent to an assault on Serge to stop him
making the incident public.
Only Serge
insists that some accounting must be made, that the boys must face some
consequences for their cruel, violent behavior. Only Serge is willing to make
the real sacrifices that come with parenthood, giving up his career to see his
son through this difficult passage. Serge stands, in the end, as the single
contradiction to Paul’s general indictment of humanity—he may, in
fact, be driven by simple, animal appetites, but he is undeniably the most
human character in the book. Only in Paul’s world can that essential
humanity be so devalued.
What do Paul’s revelations regarding his own
history mean for the story?
As the
evening progresses, Paul loses track of the polite conversation swirling around
him, instead lapsing into reminiscences. Over the course of the evening, he
remembers a trip to Serge and Babette’s summer home in France, during
which he imagines the French workmen of the region, who have already expressed
their resentment of the Dutch visitors in graffiti, rising up and beating the
smug, provincial Dutch visitors: “You could lure one of these Dutch
pussies away from his home under the pretense that you knew where there was
another, even cheaper winemaker, then pound him to a pulp in some cornfield.
Not just slap him up against the side of the head—no, sterner stuff,
baseball bats and flails” (p. 69). He recalls an incident when Michel was
eight, during which he threatened to beat with a bicycle pump a shop keeper who
yelled at the boy for kicking a soccer ball through his window, and a more
recent encounter with Michel’s school principal, during which he beat the
man violently. And he relates his own history, including a dismissal from his
job as a history teacher and a consequent psychiatric evaluation that resulted
in his being prescribed medication—medication he subsequently quit
taking—to mitigate the symptoms of a genetic syndrome, an inheritable
defect that produces his behavior.
These
stories should offer some kind of reassurance. Re-situating Michel’s
behavior in the context of his father’s history, they suggest a rational,
scientific explanation for his horrific acts: he has inherited a genetic
syndrome, a physiological defect. But that rational explanation offers no
comfort. Even the fact that the condition could be treated is cold comfort, as
Paul has already refused the medication that would render him “normal.”
Rather than containing the threat of Michel’s and Paul’s violence, the
heritability renders that threat more insidious, more pervasive. The
sociopathic tendencies Paul and Michel exhibit are not unique to them, cannot
be contained in their particular context or even within their individual
persons. They are not a matter of choice or of moral judgment. They are,
rather, part of the genetic inheritance of all humanity—we all carry the
seeds of Michel’s (and Paul’s) violence within us.
Why is Paul so concerned with protecting his
family’s happiness?
Paul is,
from the beginning, concerned above all with keeping his family happy, or at
least with maintaining the illusion of a happy family. As the evening begins,
he introduces a line that will become a sort of mantra, a theme threading
through the narrative. Quoting the first sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina, he says, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way” (p. 6). For the rest of the novel, he
strives to cling to the idea that his family belongs to the first category, the
unremarkable, undifferentiated mass of happy families, that nothing that has
happened has violated or reduced that happiness. Everything he does in reaction
to Michel’s crime is directed at ensuring that “we would be able to
go on living as a happy family” (p. 149).
His drive
to preserve that happiness has a whiff of desperation about it; even looking at
Michel’s phone, he worries that the action will create “a fissure
that with the passing of time would expand into a substantial chasm. Our life
as a happy family would never be the same” (p. 14). He regrets finding
the incriminating videos on YouTube because they compromise his belief in that
happiness: “I could have lived on a few more days, or maybe a few weeks
or months, in my dreams about happy families” (p. 153). He even refuses
to admit that the secrets he, Claire, and Michel have kept from each other
could compromise their happy family: “Claire and I. Claire and Michel and
I. We shared something. Something that hadn’t been there before. All
right, we didn’t all share the same thing, but maybe that’s not
necessary. You don’t have to know everything about each other. Secrets
didn’t get in the way of happiness” (p. 289). At the end of the
evening, faced with documentary evidence of the depth of Claire’s
secrets—an amniotic fluid test she never told Paul she had—he turns
away. “Do I need to know this? I thought. Do I want to know this? Will it
make us happier as a family?” (p. 290). No, he decides, and returns the
page of test results to the dresser drawer where he found it.
Clearly,
this is not the certainty of a devoted family man; Paul’s vision of
himself and Claire as “two parts of a happy family” (p. 288) is
assiduously protected. But his investment in that vision has nothing to do with
devotion to family. Rather, it is tied to his horror of judgment and the
inescapability of the judgment of others. As he and Claire stroll to the cafe
before meeting Paul and Babette for dinner, he contemplates the nature of happy
families:
If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be
this: that happiness needs nothing but itself; it doesn’t have to be
validated. . . . 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. (p. 6)
In other
words, it is precisely the generic quality of happy
families—Tolstoy’s idea that “happy families are all alike"—that
Paul craves. Happy families are self-contained and undifferentiated; they
require nothing from anyone. They are immune from the judgment of others. They
are, in short, free, as Paul himself, ever conscious of the judgment of others,
can never be.
What role do secrets and secrecy play in the novel?
The
Dinner is riddled with secrets: secrets the characters keep from each other
and from themselves, as well as secrets kept from readers. Claire and Paul are
privy to different pieces of Michel’s crime at different
times—Claire knows of the incineration of the homeless person at the ATM
machine the night it happens, but it is Paul who discovers the videos on
YouTube and on Michel’s phone—videos of that assault and others. And
later, only Claire knows of Beau’s attempt to blackmail Rick and Michel
with the threat to publicize all of the videos. Claire and Michel concoct the
plan for Michel to handle Beau while Claire and Paul are at dinner with
Beau’s parents, though it’s never revealed what exactly Michel is
to do.
Paul keeps
secrets on a grand scale, concealing key details of his story even from
readers. He resorts frequently to a paranoid generality, refusing to give the
name of the restaurant, for instance, “because next time it might be full
of people who’ve come to see whether we’re there” (p. 3). He
repeatedly refuses to name places or people and later, at a moment when the
time is central to the plot, refuses to share this information:
“I’m not going to say exactly what time it was. Exact times can
turn on you later” (p. 249). It is an odd evasiveness, especially given
his willingness to share truly incriminating, even horrifying details about
Michel’s crime and about his own past. At times, it seems
self-protective. Not supplying the name of the female student who reported his
inappropriate comments on her paper to the school headmaster, for example,
refuses her an identity, renders her abstract, less than human, and protects
his sense of superiority. Not naming the restaurant protects him from the
prying, judging eyes of others.
The
Dinner could arguably be described as a crime story, in that it explores a
horrific crime. But in most crime stories, the secrets are eventually aired to
arrive at some kind of truth. The Dinner arrives at no such tidy
conclusion. In the end, the secrets, large and small, remain. Paul claims never
to look at the results of Claire’s amniocentesis. Michel never says
exactly what happened to Beau while his parents were out to dinner. Claire and
Paul never clear the air about who knew what about Michel’s crime and when,
or what exactly happened to Serge at the cafe after the dinner. And the
insidious evil of Michel’s crime—and his parents’ refusal to
recognize it—goes unrecognized and unpunished.
About the Author
Before he became a writer,
Herman Koch was a comedy actor and writer who appeared in radio comedy shows
and acted on television in a satiric comedy sketch show he describes as similar
to Monty Python's performances or The Office. Born in Arnhem, Netherlands,
in September 1953, he moved with his family to Amsterdam when he was two years
old. He now lives in Amsterdam with his wife, Amalia Rodriguez, and their son,
Pablo.
Koch (whose name is pronounced
similar to “Cook,” but with the final sound halfway between a hard k
and an x) is the author of six novels and several collections of short
stories, but The Dinner is the first of his works to be translated. The
Dinner has, in fact, been a success on several counts: Translated into 21
languages, it has sold over a million copies across Europe. It was awarded the
2009 NS Audience Award and has been adapted for both theater and film. A Dutch
movie is scheduled for release in late 2013.
Further Reading
William Landay, Defending Jacob (2012)
When a 14-year-old boy is found murdered, his body hidden in the woods
around an upper-class Boston suburb, Assistant District Attorney Andy Barber
vows to bring the killer to justice and allay the fears of the small community.
But then evidence identifies Andy’s son Jacob as the killer. As Andy
fights to defend his son, both Jacob’s secrets and his own are revealed,
testing his marriage and forcing him to consider how far he will go to protect
the child he loves.
Thomas H. Cook, The Last Talk with Lola Faye
(2010)
Luke Paige is a disillusioned academic who feels intensely his failure to live
up to what he saw as his early brilliance. Now middle-aged, he is on a book
tour for another of his mediocre history books when he runs into Lola Faye
Gilroy, the woman he believes set off a tragic chain of events that led to the
murder of his father when he was in high school. He agrees to have a drink with
Lola Faye, and his conversation with the woman he’d like to blame for his
father’s death makes for chillingly compelling reading.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (2012)
When Amy Dunne disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary,
husband Nick is the prime suspect. In alternating first-person
segments—from Nick’s point of view as he weathers the storm of
attention around his wife’s disappearance and from Amy’s diary—the
novel maps out what happens when soulmates turn toxic.
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991)
By day, Patrick Bateman is a Wall Street power broker, a wealthy, handsome
star of Manhattan’s young elites. By night, he is a serial killer
spiraling out of control, engaging in increasingly complex and extended sprees
of rape, torture, and murder. The first person narrative forces the reader to
see through Bateman’s eyes even as Bateman’s crimes are repulsive
and cruel. The descriptions of Bateman’s violence are intense and
graphic, but American Psycho is not a simple work of splatter horror.
Rather, it’s an exploration of the empty savagery of capitalism.
Albert Camus, The Fall (1957)
Camus’s last complete work of fiction is a series of monologues by
Jean-Baptiste Clamence, once a highly respected defense lawyer and now a
regular patron of the seedy Amsterdam bar Mexico City. In meetings at
the bar and in his rented room, Clamence tells an unnamed acquaintance how he
fell from his former high status and how he came to be in possession of a
famous fifteenth-century masterpiece. Set in Amsterdam against the backdrop of
World War II and the Holocaust, The Fall explores humanity’s
propensity for evil in chillingly personal terms.
This Book Discussion Guide was developed by
MaryAnne M. Gobble, who has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a freelance writer and editor living
and working in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her website address is
http://maryannegobble.com
This material is copyrighted. Text may not be copied without the
express written permission of the publisher except for the imprint of
the video screen content or via the output options of the EBSCOhost
software. Text is intended solely for the use of the individual user.
Book Discussion date and time: Thursday, October 23, 2014, at 1:00 PM.
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