I dine with Herman Koch in Holland

The Dinner****
by Herman Koch

Holland: It isn't just tulips and windmills. Or bicycles and thrift. Or even the social tolerance that allows Amsterdam's red light district to flourish. Herman Koch's skillful novel, "The Dinner," exposes readers to a narrator who is both fascinating and repellent, and reminds them that the Netherlands is also a nation where euthanasia, eugenics, and xenophobia have reared their heads and posed difficult and sometimes shocking moral questions. (Click on the pretty picture at left to get a load of some of Holland's current social problems.)

The book is divided into the courses of a meal that Paul, the book's narrator, is having at a high-toned restaurant with his brother, Serge, and their wives. Serge is poised to be Holland's next prime minister. Paul is poised to ...well, it's hard to write about this without spoilers. Let's just say that Paul has a certain schadenfreude when it comes to his brother's family, and that this animosity is revealed more deeply with each course of the meal. And I think Koch means us to see some of the social ills in his native country through Paul's character.

***SEMI-SPOILERS FOLLOW***Paul's character poses a moral conundrum: What if you could genetically identify people without empathy, the kind who become sociopaths, who are prone to violent crime? Should such people be eliminated? Doctors seem to "advise" parents to do so, though the decision is the parents'. And given events in this novel, that advice seems to be fairly prudent, especially given that it would mean that those without empathy might have children without empathy, and the zeitgeist in which that child was raised would be a particularly toxic mix of nature and nurture.

But Koch is not satisfied with such a simple solution. The doctors in this novel lump psychopathic fetuses in with those with Down syndrome, and I think this juxtaposition is meant to make the reader feel unsettled. Children with Down's are often sweet and trusting--so much so that that is often the very reason "normal" people feel uncomfortable with them.

Paul is generally believable as a real person, though at times he seems a little over-the-top. I think at those points, the reader is invited to see Paul's self-delusion and -justification about foreigners, history, the poor, and the marginalized as a stand-in for the national DoubleThink that infects Dutch society. Ugliness festers under the civilized and tidy facade of the Netherlands, as it does under any industrialized Western nation. Money and technology can solve a lot of problems, of course, in the form of the eradication of disease and creation of social safety nets. But in the process, as Koch's novel points out, new moral problems arise.