He touches on the burdens that are carried through life, both those that are shared and those that must be carried alone, and how choices can divide and define someone.

With his dinnertime snapshot, Koch deftly provokes those murky spaces that exist between people. The concepts of public vs private life are raised, as is the line between youth and adulthood - that blurry area where the responsibilities of the child and of the parent overlap. The mildly tepid evening ramps up as the veneer of civility and decorum begins to fragment, as questions of guilt and innocence, intention and responsibility are argued. This background frames the dinner that serves as the canvas upon which the two men and their wives deliberate the proper reaction to potentially criminal activities perpetrated by their two teenage sons. In building the story of their relationship, Koch explores the nuances of privilege, sincerity and loyalty, with the brothers at opposing ends of the spectrum. Paul has spent his whole life competing with his brother and, in his mind, at least, he has never quite measured up. From the beginning, the reader is handed the notion that dinner in a fashionable restaurant lends a layer of insincerity to any encounter, and all the diners are wearing their own unique masks of propriety, hiding the real person and the real feelings beneath. Like a spring being tightly wound, an undefined tension mounts with each vague page.

The story unfolds in vignettes, with the characters slowly emerging, written in a style that is all show and no tell, much like a stage production.įrom the beginning, it is clear that something ominous looms, and reading it is a bit like the putting together of a puzzle without having had a glimpse of the finished image. Herman Koch’s “The Dinner” is one such book, a brassy novel that explores the limits of human cruelty and deception, all served up as a five-course dinner fiasco.

In this age of self-indulgence and narcissism, sometimes a piece of writing comes along that speaks directly to our convoluted contemporary norms and values, laying bare the gritty and caustic ugliness that can pervade families in this high stakes, competitive world.

The dinner by herman koch