The Dinner and more.

Two new breakdowns for Insiders – on the Jose Veras trade and the Scott Downs trade. More to come as we get more trade action.

Herman Koch’s The Dinner made it on to my to-read list about a year and a half ago after I caught a very positive review in the Guardian, a left-wing British paper that has one of the stronger arts sections I’ve come across. I finally picked the book up last month and … well, it’s a strangely mixed bag of bad writing and fascinating character study.

The story revolves around two couples having a dinner out where they are supposed to discuss the fact that their sons have committed a grievous crime, caught on CCTV that isn’t clear enough to identify the boys publicly but makes it clear to the parents who the guilty parties are – with the stakes rising when the video appears on Youtube with a telling detail at the end. Paul, the father of one of the boys, narrates the book; the other father, Serge, is a prominent public figure. The book’s path is nonlinear, with flashbacks and wobbly narration, but the slope of the plot line is negative, as one secret after another is revealed and it becomes clear that Paul’s narration isn’t as reliable as he’d like us to believe, while Serge, depicted from the start as something of an asshat, isn’t the root of the boys’ evil, either.

It turns out that the plot isn’t actually the most important aspect of The Dinner, but is a vehicle for Koch’s studies of multiple characters, which all seem to be wrapped up in a greater examination of the latent sociopathy of modern middle-class parents. Koch never quite labels anyone a sociopath, but his scorn for such parents and their willingness to subvert their own morals to protect their children is evident. Even when one of the parents appears to want to do something resembling the right thing, it’s from base motives that do credit to neither parent nor child.

Koch is playing the fabulist here by creating parents who are more caricatures than realistic characters, bearing elements we might recognize in our friends or neighbors (or, heaven forbid, ourselves), but with wholes that feel flimsy. I’m avoiding too much discussion of specific characters to avoid spoiling anything, as Koch peels back the onion of his story over the course of the book’s 300 pages, but none of the four parent characters felt remotely real to me, and the two fathers are both drawn with sharp edges yet without internal shading. Koch created these characters so that they’d have to speak and behave in specific ways to achieve his desired outcome – and while the outcome itself reveals much about his characters, and at least will provoke readers to think about how close these actions and words come to reality, this artifice detracted greatly from the entire exercise for me.

Koch also made some curious decisions with the screen time granted to his four main characters, spending too much time with Paul and Serge while largely leaving their wives in the background. Clare, Paul’s wife, deserved far more attention, but her actions are largely on the periphery and mostly in reaction to Paul – although it’s unclear whether she views him as a partner or an antagonist to be managed. Babette, Serge’s wife, spends half of her scenes in tears, and only develops as a character in the final scenes, so late that her true motives are never apparent at all.

I don’t know if Koch is simply a clunky, awkward writer, or if the translation is poor, but I found his prose very weak and phrasing choppier than rough seas. (I’d offer examples, but the book is in Delaware and I am not.) The narrator is not entirely stable himself, so I’m willing to cut Koch some slack in this regard as a character like that shouldn’t think in clear, fluid sentences, but that doesn’t make it any easier to read.

Yet despite this laundry list of flaws, The Dinner does do two things very well. The suspense created by Koch’s decisions to hide most details from the reader at the beginning, unfurling everything in discrete, small steps, creates tremendous narrative greed that led me through the book at high velocity until it ended. And if his intent was indeed to explore or expose the banality of evil in middle-class families, he at least begins the excavation process, especially with Paul and Serge. It’s more fun-house mirror than looking-glass, but the picture staring back at us isn’t pretty.

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I’ve also been moving through more of the Bloomsbury 100’s classics, including Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or the Two Nations and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Disraeli’s legacy as a politican is stronger than his legacy as a writer, but Sybil holds up well as a work of political fiction, a furious rant about growing inequality in 1840s England and the aristocratic class’s refusal to acknowledge the issue or make any accommodations to address it. Disraeli grafts a romance on to his polemic, where a manor-born lord falls for the sweet, pretty daughter of a working man and socialist agitator, but the purpose of the book is clear – to stir up indignation in the hearts of the readers, against the country’s caste system and in favor of workers’ rights and a stronger social safety net. While many of his arguments are dated, the book’s core message about income inequality and the chasm between capital and labor feels just as relevant today. He even cites the often-heard argument that the lower classes are better off today than they’ve ever been, which is true but doesn’t mean they’re objectively as well-off as they could or perhaps should be, even if the issues Disraeli covers have been replaced by matters like lack of job security or spiraling health-care costs.

Hogg’s book reads today like a proto-novel for numerous genres – it’s a supernatural mystery, a gothic horror story, a religious parable, very early metafiction, and, most of all, it’s creepy-weird. The sinner of the book’s title is raised to believe he’s one of God’s elect – the novel is a clear attack on the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, now a quaint relic – and, in the process, becomes one hell of a sinner. The first third of the novel is a lengthy prologue, leading into the “memoir” itself, where the sinner tells of the extraorindary stranger who leads him down the road to perdition, a stranger whose true nature is never fully revealed to the reader. The satirical elements will likely pass by a modern reader, but it was a fascinating read for how it presaged so many subgenres of fiction and likely influenced later novels like Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (#12 on my all-time novels ranking).