Short Take: The Dinner, Herman Koch

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The 2009 novel The Dinner, by the Dutch writer Herman Koch, is an intricately crafted and darkly entertaining read. Koch uses a familiar modernist structure. A small, mundane scenario--in this instance, a get-together among two brothers and their wives at an upscale Amsterdam restaurant--is used as a springboard for a series of observations and recollections by the narrator. He is the younger of the two brothers, and his musings at first are quite funny. He takes a sardonic view of the consumerist, appearance-obsessed pretensions of bourgeois urbanites, and his occasionally boorish older brother is his principal target. But the novel’s tone becomes more sinister as the evening continues. All four of the principals are on edge, and the tension occasionally boils over. The dinner turns out not to be a social occasion, and its true purpose gradually comes to light. The teenage sons of both couples are potentially in an enormous amount of trouble, and the parents have to decide what to do. At that point, the stage has been set for a brilliant series of narrative reversals. The narrator’s initially entertaining disaffection is revealed as something quite disturbing, and one’s views of the other characters are turned upside down. With regard to the dilemma concerning the sons, one goes from sympathetic to surprised to horrified at what is done and condoned in the cause of their future. The finale is powerfully ironic: the narrator, so cynically disdainful of bourgeois preoccupations with status, comes to exemplify the depth of evil those values can foster. Koch does a masterful job of orchestrating the shifts in both the story and its tone. The novel goes from a light social satire to a profoundly unsettling one, and it’s quite a roller-coaster ride. The English-language edition was translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett.

Short Take: The Help, Kathryn Stockett

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s phenomenally successful 2009 début novel, is compelling regardless of one's reservations. The book is set in and around Jackson, Mississippi in 1962 and 1963. Stockett constructs the story around three protagonists: Skeeter, an upper-class young woman who aspires to become a writer; Aibileen, a gracious, thoughtful African-American maid; and Aibileen’s brash best friend Minnie, who also works as a maid and a cook. The tensions created by the burgeoning civil rights movement fill the air, and these three women are brought together by a clandestinely written book project about the experiences of African-American domestics in the 1960s South. Stockett has many hallmarks of a good storyteller. She has a sharp eye for incident and conflict, a knack for humor, and a strong feel for the narrative voices of her protagonists. She also does well by her supporting characters. The most memorable is the town queen bee, who’s a fine comic villain. The queen bee is both effective as a threat and as the butt of the book’s humor. One relishes every moment of her getting her just des(s)erts--including a grandly scatological comeuppance--and one can’t help but dread the consequences, too. While the book is ultimately just glib historical fiction, it occasionally flirts with profundity, particularly when it highlights how the various social hegemonies quietly reinforce themselves across all lines of race, class, and gender. The book's virtues are more than enough to forgive its numerous shortcomings. The most conspicuous of the latter is probably the conception of the Skeeter character, who is clearly the author’s self-congratulatory fantasy of herself in the story's setting. The novel also never quite transcends the stock-character quality of both Aibileen and Minnie. (Just think of the Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington characters in the film Glory.) But for all the book’s failings, Stockett keeps one turning the pages. That's the first--and hardest--demand for any novelist.