Something about The Dinner makes me want to give it only three stars but it feels like a four star book, and as it has lingered with me while I found the time to write a review, I'm going to rate it from my gut.
I'm intrigued that so many people here call Paul a textbook unreliable narrator, but that seems imperfect to me, according to how I interpret the device. The definition from Wikipedia:
An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually to deceive the reader or audience.
The nature of the narrator is sometimes immediately clear. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to his or her unreliability. A more dramatic use of the device delays the revelation until near the story's end. This twist ending forces readers to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. In some cases the narrator's unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving readers to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.
While Paul, as a character, appears truthful and forthcoming, Herman Koch, as an author, has constructed a form that reveals information so haphazardly, out of sequence and context, that by the end the reader does need to go back and re-evaluate each of the characters and their motivations. I'd say this story is like peeling an onion, but even that has a logical order, from outer to inner. The Dinner is more like eating an artichoke carelessly; randomly plucking first a sweet and tender inner leaf and then a tough and woody outer one, arbitrarily choosing one or the other until the meaty center is reached. Yet, I wouldn't call the pacing of this book arbitrary: the information is doled out so carefully that I didn't feel cheated or tricked by the author-- or the narrator. To me, the textbook unreliable narrator is Roseanne McNulty in The Secret Scripture, with a reveal that made me gasp, so Paul felt like something else.
While the plot and characters and format of The Dinner merited four stars, the writing itself is pretty much just okay. It's rare that I read a book and don't mark some lovely phrases that I'd like to remember. I was also struck by Koch's (or the translator's?) frequent use of colons, which is a little funny, since I was recently awed by Lisa Moore's use of semicolons. In her novel February, the semicolons focussed my attention on certain passages, while in The Dinner, the colons caused me to stop abruptly, trying to fathom their purpose. A random (and maybe not the best) example:
The pinky vaulted over the crayfish to point out two brown toadstools, cut lengthwise; the "chanterelles" looked as though they had been uprooted only a few minutes ago: what was sticking to the bottom, I figured, could only be dirt.
I may need to concede that I'm not an expert on punctuation and literary devices (like unreliable narrators), but anything that stops the flow of my reading will adversely affect my experience, and I see colons so infrequently that spotting several on one page seems quirky at best. The Dinner also had a screenplay (rather than literary) feel, and I wasn't surprised to see in the author bio that Koch works in television. Each scene is so precisely set that I could imagine the film version and that heightened my enjoyment, to my surprise.
This is the only passage I marked, not for its literary value, but because it neatly sums up a complaint I recently made about David Rakoff, Jon Stewart, and David Sedaris:
The principal was probably against global warming and injustice in general. Perhaps he didn't eat the flesh of mammals and was anti-American or, in any case, anti-Bush: the latter stance gave people carte blanche not to think about anything anymore. Anyone who was against Bush had his heart in the right place and could behave like a boorish asshole toward anyone around him.
There were so many surprises in this book, revealed in a masterful way, that any literary shortcomings were overcome by my overall enjoyment. Perhaps "enjoyment" is a loaded word-- to what extent can you enjoy despicable acts and unlikeable characters? This reading experience was similar to when I read We Need To Talk About Kevin-- it touched me as a parent and made me wonder how I would react in the same situation. Are there moral absolutes when you're talking about your own children? I need to urge someone I know to read this book so we can discuss it-- perhaps over dinner at a trendy restaurant.
