It’s Always Darkest Before It Turns Pitch Black
My wife’s book club had read Herman Koch’s The Dinner when it came out in 2013, so when she saw me headed into the living room with her copy of it a while back, she predicted that I’d read through it in a single sitting—and she wasn’t that far off. (About halfway through, I had to get a glass of water.) For those of you not familiar with the novel, it’s essentially a monologue by Paul Lohman, a retired Dutch schoolteacher who, as the story begins, is out with his wife, on their way to a trendy restaurant where they’ll meet Paul’s older brother, Serge, and his wife, to discuss a situation that affects not only their respective children but Serge’s political aspirations.
Now, Paul is an extremely cagey narrator, and the story unfolds in a series of micro-revelations, so—after a few chapters—I went back to my wife, and I asked her, “This video, it’s going to turn out to be [redacted], right?†Oh, no, she assured me, it’s much worse than that. Much, much worse, it would turn out.
And, sure, some of the power of The Dinner lies in the shocking incident at the heart of the story, but only some. The greater strength of the novel is in Paul’s personality and the way it shifts from the time he and his wife leave for the restaurant to the time he returns home. In the beginning, we’re drawn in by his narration; he may be a bit closed off emotionally, but he’s smart and engaging, perhaps especially in his annoyances at the little pretensions of those around him. We may be able to identify with those frustrations, and consequently find ourselves warming up to him, taking his side against Serge’s before the evening has really begun.
It’s safe to say you’ll come to feel very differently about Paul by the end. As a narrator, Paul reminded me a great deal of Lou Ford, the protagonist of Jim Thompson’s noir classic The Killer Inside Me. I was reading The Dinner in preparation for an interview with Herman Koch, part of the “Word for Word†series at Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan, so when we met before the event, I brought this up. (I didn’t want to spring it on him in front of an audience and then find out maybe he wasn’t familiar with Thompson, after all.) As it turned out, he hadn’t read that novel, but (after The Dinner was written), he had looked up another of Thompson’s books, Pop. 1280, and he could see where people would find the common ground.
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11 June 2014 | read this |
A Look at 2013’s Best Novel Nebula Nominees
I’ve been reading my way through this year’s nominees for in the Best Novel category for the Nebulas (an annual award voted on by the Science Fiction Writers of America), and at the beginning of April I found out one of those shortlisted titles, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, had been named the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award—which, like the National Book Award, is intended to recognize the year’s best in American fiction.
It’s a great selection; I was completely hooked by the story before the end of the first chapter, and by the voice of Rosemary Cooke, a college student prompted by her friendship with a volatile classmate to prod the memories of her own emotional trauma, which stem from her sister’s removal from the family nearly twenty years earlier. Fowler deliberately keeps the details sketchy, parsing out information about Fern in bits and pieces, shaping the way that readers process Rosemary’s story and her emotional state before the big reveal. (Some reviewers have discussed this aspect of the story openly; indeed, if you’re going to have any sort of extended discussion about how We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves works as a novel, you can’t avoid the spoiler. But I’m going to let you discover it for yourself.)
My only point of pushback against this novel as a Nebula nominee is that it isn’t science fiction, at least not as I’ve come to understand the term through a lifetime of reading. Yes, the truth about Fern is directly related to the scientific research the Cooke parents were conducting—but there is nothing fantastical or futuristic about that research. In fact, Fowler bases the Cooke family’s experiment on several prior real-life examples, and she keeps what happens well within the realm of the scientifically plausible. The results, I’d say, are much closer to the social-issue novels of Jodi Picoult or Ruth Ozeki than to science fiction or fantasy.
(I’ve heard a similar point raised about another of the Nebula nominees, Nicola Griffith’s Hild, but I’ll recuse myself from that conversation because I’ve had just enough friendly interaction with Griffith over time that my enthusiasm for her work has very little pretense of objectivity.)
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14 April 2014 | read this |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
