The Dinner

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The darkly suspenseful tale of two families struggling to make the hardest decision of their lives—all over the course of one meal. Now a major motion picture.

“Chilling, nasty, smart, shocking, and unputdownable.”—Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl
 
It’s a summer’s evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.
 
Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act—an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children, and as civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.
 
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
 
“A European Gone Girl . . . A sly psychological thriller.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Brilliantly engineered . . . The novel is designed to make you think twice, then thrice, not only about what goes on within its pages, but also the next time indignation rises up, pure and fiery, in your own heart.”—Salon
 
“You’ll eat it up, with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”—Entertainment Weekly

“[Koch] has created a clever, dark confection . . . absorbing and highly readable.”—New York Times Book Review
 
“Tongue-in-cheek page-turner.”—The Washington Post

“[A] deliciously Mr. Ripley-esque drama.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2013
An ALA Notable Book of the Year
New York Times Bestseller * USA Today Bestseller * Los Angeles Times Bestseller

“A European Gone Girl…The Dinner, a sly psychological thriller that hinges on a horrific crime and its consequences for two families, has become one of spring’s most anticipated suspense novels.” —The Wall Street Journal

“[Koch] has created a clever, dark confection… absorbing and highly readable.”
—New York Times Book Review
 
“Tongue-in-cheek page-turner.” —The Washington Post
 
“The best part about The Dinner was this tension taking place above the plates. As the meal wore on, I realized I couldn't get up from the table.” —Rosecrans Baldwin, NPR

“Poised to shake up American publishing…Koch tells a story that could very well take away your appetite.” —USA Today.com

“[A] deliciously Mr. Ripley-esque drama.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“You’ll eat it up, with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.” —Entertainment Weekly 
 
“Koch’s ability to toy with the reader’s alliances while using one family’s distress to consider greater societal ills gives the novel a vital punch.” —Daily Beast
 
“Every detail…manage[s] to catch our attention when Herman Koch uses them to develop his curious characters and bring us into the dark and thought-provoking plot.” —Seattle Post Intelligencer

“A tart main course that explores how quickly the facade of civility can crumble. It's hard to digest at times, but with a thought-provoking taste that lingers.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
 
“The novel has been called the Gone Girl of the Continent, and not without cause: Like Gillian Flynn’s bestseller, it’s a tale told by an unreliable narrator, full of twists and skillfully executed revelations, ultimately registering as a black parable about the deceptively civilized surface of cosmopolitan, middle-class lives…What Koch achieves with his prose—plain but undergirded by breathtaking angles, like a beautiful face scrubbed free of makeup — is a brilliantly engineered and (for the thoughtful reader) chastening mindfuck. The novel is designed to make you think twice, then thrice, not only about what goes on within its pages, but also the next time indignation rises up, pure and fiery, in your own heart.” —Salon.com
 
“Briskly paced and full of ingenious twists—a compulsive read…for those who can tolerate the unsavory company, The Dinner is a treat they’ll gulp down in one sitting.”
—Dallas Morning News

“The Dinner begins with drinks and dark satire, and goes stealthily and hauntingly from there. It's chilling, nasty, smart, shocking and unputdownable. Read the novel in one big gulp, and then make plans with friends—you’ll be desperate to debate this book over cocktails, appetizers, entrees, dessert…and then you still won't be done talking about it.” —Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl

“Funny, provocative and exceedingly dark, this is a brilliantly addictive novel that wraps its hands around your throat on page one and doesn’t let go.” —SJ Watson, author of Before I Go to Sleep
 
“Herman Koch has written a sneakily disturbing novel.  He lures us into his story with his unfailingly reasonable tone (just acidic enough to be entertaining), and before we know it we've found ourselves in places we never would've consented to go.  The Dinner is a smart, amiably misanthropic book, and it's tremendous fun to read.” —Scott Smith, author of The Ruins
 
“The Dinner is a riveting, compelling and a deliciously uncomfortable read. Like all great satire it is both lacerating and so very funny... Intelligent and complex, this novel is both a punch to the guts and also a tonic. It clears the air. A wonderful book.”
—Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap

“What a tremendous book. I loved every single gripping and strange thing about it.”
—MJ Hyland, author of Carry Me Down

“By the end of The Dinner you'll have to rethink everything, including who you are and what you believe. This is a book you won't forget.” —David Vann, author of Dirt

“Mesmerizing and disturbing… fast-paced and addictive…The Dinner, already a bestseller in Europe, is sure to find an enthusiastic American readership as well.” 
—Book Page

“This chilling novel starts out as a witty look at contemporary manners…before turning into a take-no-prisoners psychological thriller…With dark humor, Koch dramatizes the lengths to which people will go to preserve a comfortable way of life…this is a cunningly crafted thriller that will never allow you to look at a serviette in the same way again.”
—Publishers Weekly(starred review)

“A high-class meal provides an unlikely window into privilege, violence and madness…Koch’s slow revelation of the central crisis is expertly paced, and he’s opened up a serious question of what parents owe their children, and how much of their character is passed on to them…a chilling vision of the ugliness of keeping up appearances.”
—Kirkus

International Praise for The Dinner

“The perfect undemanding, credible, terrifying beach read.” —Financial Times

‘‘[The Dinner] proves how powerful fiction can be in illuminating the modern world...The reader does not rise from his table happy and replete so much as stand up suddenly, pale and reeling. Bored with Fifty Shades of Grey and all that brouhaha? Read The Dinner—and taste the shock.” —The Economist

“I’m confidently predicting that The Dinner will become this summer’s literary talk of the town—and the Twittersphere—here in the UK, as it already is in Continental Europe, where the novel has sold more than a million copies. Order yours now.”
—Evening Standard

“Shivers kept shooting up my backbone as I became engrossed in Koch’s darkly disturbing tale of family life. . .As the dinner disintegrates into mayhem, we discover just how far the middle classes will go to protect their monstrous offspring.” —Daily Mail

“Rather like The Slap it is set to become a contentious must-read. It may thrill, chill or cheat, but it is undeniably riveting.” —The Independent

“This tense and thought-provoking family drama is set to become a major literary talking point as it asks the question: Just how far would you go to protect your family?” —The Bookseller

“Hugely accomplished and surprisingly subtle.” —Readers Digest (UK)

HERMAN KOCH is the author of seven novels and three collections of short stories. The Dinner, his sixth novel, has been published in twenty-five countries, and was the winner of the Publieksprijs Prize in 2009. He currently lives in Amsterdam.

1

We were going out to dinner. I won’t say which restaurant, because next time it might be full of people who’ve come to see whether we’re there. Serge made the reservation. He’s always the one who arranges it, the reservation. This particular restaurant is one where you have to call three months in advance--or six, or eight, don’t ask me. Personally, I’d never want to know three months in advance where I’m going to eat on any given evening, but apparently some people don’t mind. A few centuries from now, when historians want to know what kind of crazies people were at the start of the twenty-first century, all they’ll have to do is look at the computer files of the so-called “top” restaurants. That information is kept on file--I happen to know that. If Mr. L. was prepared to wait three months for a window seat last time, then this time he’ll wait for five months for a table beside the men’s room--that’s what restaurants call “customer relations management.”

Serge never reserves a table three months in advance. Serge makes the reservation on the day itself--he says he thinks of it as a sport. You have restaurants that reserve a table for people like Serge Lohman, and this restaurant happens to be one of them. One of many, I should say. It makes you wonder whether there isn’t one restaurant in the whole country where they don’t go faint right away when they hear the name Serge Lohman on the phone. He doesn’t make the call himself, of course; he lets his secretary or one of his assistants do that. “Don’t worry about it,” he told me when I talked to him a few days ago. “They know me there; I can get us a table.” All I’d asked was whether it wasn’t a good idea to call, in case they were full, and where we would go if they were. At the other end of the line, I thought I heard something like pity in his voice. I could almost see him shake his head. It was a sport.

There was one thing I didn’t feel like that evening. I didn’t feel like being there when the owner or on-duty manager greeted Serge Lohman as though he were an old friend. Like seeing how the waitress would lead him to the nicest table on the side facing the garden, or how Serge would act as though he had it all coming to him--that deep down he was still an ordinary guy, and that was why he felt entirely comfortable among other ordinary people.

Which was precisely why I’d told him we would meet in the restaurant itself and not, as he’d suggested, at the cafe around the corner. It was a cafe where a lot of ordinary people went. How Serge Lohman would walk in there like a regular guy, with a grin that said that all those ordinary people should above all go on talking and act as though he wasn’t there--I didn’t feel like that, either.



2

The restaurant is only a few blocks from our house, so we walked. That also brought us past the cafe where I hadn’t wanted to meet Serge. I had my arm around my wife’s waist; her hand was tucked somewhere inside my coat. The sign outside the cafe was lit with the warm red-and-white colors of the brand of beer they had on tap. “We’re too early,” I said to my wife. “I mean, if we go now, we’ll be right on time.”

“My wife.” I should stop calling her that. Her name is Claire. Her parents named her Marie Claire, but in time Claire didn’t feel like sharing her name with a magazine. Sometimes I call her Marie, just to tease her. But I rarely refer to her as “my wife”--on official occasions sometimes, or in sentences like “My wife can’t come to the phone right now,” or “My wife is very sure she asked for a room with a sea view.”

On evenings like this, Claire and I make the most of the moments when it’s still just the two of us. Then it’s as though everything is still up for grabs, as though the dinner date were only a misunderstanding, as though it’s just the two of us out on the town. If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be this: happiness needs nothing but itself, it doesn’t have to be validated. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. All I could hope to add to that is that unhappy families--and within those families, in particular the unhappy husband and wife--can never get by on their own. The more validators, the merrier. Unhappiness loves company. Unhappiness can’t stand silence--especially not the uneasy silence that settles in when it is all alone.

So when the bartender at the cafe put our beers down in front of us, Claire and I smiled at each other in the knowledge that we would soon be spending an entire evening in the company of the Lohmans--in the knowledge that this was the finest moment of that evening, that from here on it would all be downhill.

I didn’t feel like going to the restaurant. I never do. A fixed appointment for the immediate future is the gates of hell; the actual evening is hell itself. It starts in front of the mirror in the morning: what you’re going to wear, and whether or not you’re going to shave. At times like these, after all, everything is a statement, a pair of torn and stained jeans as much as a neatly ironed shirt. If you don’t scrape off the day’s stubble, you were too lazy to shave; two days’ beard immediately makes them wonder whether this is some new look; three days or more is just a step from total dissolution. “Are you feeling all right? You’re not sick, are you?” No matter what you do, you’re not free. You shave, but you’re not free. Shaving is a statement as well. Apparently you found this evening significant enough to go to the trouble of shaving, you see the others thinking--in fact, shaving already puts you behind 1–0.

And then I always have Claire to remind me that this isn’t an evening like every other. Claire is smarter than I am. I’m not saying that out of some half-baked feminist sentiment or in order to endear women to me. You’ll never hear me claim that “women in general” are smarter than men. Or more sensitive, more intuitive, that they are more “in touch with life” or any of the other horseshit that, when all is said and done, so-called “sensitive” men try to peddle more often than women themselves.

Claire just happens to be smarter than I am; I can honestly say that it took me a while to admit that. During our first years together, I thought she was intelligent, I guess, but intelligent in the usual sense: precisely as intelligent, in fact, as you might expect my wife to be. After all, would I settle for a stupid woman for any longer than a month? In any case, Claire was intelligent enough for me to stay with her even after the first month. And now, almost twenty years later, that hasn’t changed.

So Claire is smarter than I am, but on evenings like this, she still asks my opinion about what she should wear, which earrings, whether to wear her hair up or leave it down. For women, earrings are sort of what shaving is for men: the bigger the earrings, the more significant, the more festive, the evening. Claire has earrings for every occasion. Some people might say it’s not smart to be so insecure about what you wear. But that’s not how I see it. The stupid woman is the one who thinks she doesn’t need any help. What does a man know about things like that? the stupid woman thinks, and proceeds to make the wrong choice.

I’ve sometimes tried to imagine Babette asking Serge whether she’s wearing the right dress. Whether her hair isn’t too long. What Serge thinks of these shoes. The heels aren’t too flat, are they? Or maybe too high?

But whenever I do I realize there’s something wrong with the picture, something that seems unimaginable: “No, it’s fine, it’s absolutely fine,” I hear Serge say. But he’s not really paying attention. It doesn’t actually interest him, and besides, even if his wife were to wear the wrong dress, all the men would still turn their heads as she walked by. Everything looks good on her. So what’s she moaning about?

This wasn’t a hip cafe; the fashionable types didn’t come here--it wasn’t cool, Michel would say. Ordinary people were by far in the majority. Not the particularly young or the particularly old--in fact, a little bit of everything all thrown together, but above all ordinary. The way a cafe should be.

It was crowded. We stood close together, beside the door to the men’s room. Claire was holding her beer in one hand; with the fingers of the other she was gently squeezing my wrist.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’ve had the impression recently that Michel is acting strange. Well, not really strange, but different. Distant. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “I guess it’s possible.”

I had to be careful not to look at Claire--we know each other too well for that--my eyes would give me away. Instead, I behaved as though I were looking around the cafe, as though I were deeply interested in the spectacle of ordinary people involved in lively conversation. I was relieved that I’d stuck to my guns, that we wouldn’t be meeting the Lohmans until we reached the restaurant; in my mind’s eye I could see Serge coming through the swinging doors, his grin encouraging the regulars above all to go on with what they were doing and pay no attention to him.

“He hasn’t said anything to you?” Claire asked. “I mean, you two talk about other things. Do you think it might have something to do with a girl? Something he’d feel easier telling you about?”

Just then the door to the men’s room opened and we had to step to one side, pressed even closer together. I felt Claire’s beer glass clink against mine.

“Do you think it has something to do with girls?” she asked again.

If only that were true, I couldn’t help thinking. Something to do with girls . . . wouldn’t that be wonderful, wonderfully normal, the normal adolescent mess. “Can Chantal/Merel/Rose spend the night?” “Do her parents know? If Chantal’s/Merel’s/Rose’s parents think it’s okay, it’s okay with us. As long as you remember . . . as long as you’re careful when you . . . ah, you know what I mean . . . I don’t have to tell you about that anymore. Right? Michel?”

Girls came to our house often enough, each one prettier than the next. They sat on the couch or at the kitchen table and greeted me politely when I came home. “Hello, Mr. Lohman.” “You don’t have to call me Mr. Lohman. Just call me Paul.” And so they would call me “Paul” a few times, but a couple of days later it would be back to “Mr. Lohman” again.

Sometimes I would get one of them on the phone, and while I asked if I could take a message for Michel, I would shut my eyes and try to connect the girl’s voice at the other end of the line (they rarely mentioned their names, just plunged right in: “Is Michel there?”) with a face. “No, that’s okay, Mr. Lohman. It’s just that his cell phone is switched off, so I thought I’d try this number.”

A couple of times, when I came in unannounced, I’d had the impression that I’d caught them at something, Michel and Chantal/Merel/Rose: that they were watching The Fabulous Life on MTV less innocently than they wanted me to think--that they’d been fiddling with each other, that they’d rushed to straighten their clothes and hair when they heard me coming. Something about the flush on Michel’s cheeks--something heated, I told myself.

To be honest, though, I had no idea. Maybe nothing was going on at all, maybe all those pretty girls just saw my son as a good friend: a nice, rather handsome boy, someone they could show up with at a party--a boy they could trust, precisely because he wasn’t the kind who wanted to fiddle with them right away.

“No, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with a girl,” I said, looking Claire straight in the eye now. That’s the oppressive thing about happiness, the way everything is out on the table like an open book: if I avoided looking at her any longer, she’d know for sure that something was going on--with girls, or worse.

“I think it’s more like something with school,” I said. “He’s just done those exams; I think he’s tired. I think he underestimated it a little, how tough his sophomore year would be.”

Did that sound believable? And above all: did I look believable when I said it? Claire’s gaze shifted quickly back and forth between my right and my left eye; then she raised her hand to my shirt collar, as though there were something out of place there that could be dealt with now, so I wouldn’t look like an idiot when we got to the restaurant.

She smiled and placed the flat of her hand against my chest; I could feel two fingertips against my skin, right where the top button of my shirt was unbuttoned.

“Maybe that’s it,” she said. “I just think we both have to be careful that at a certain point he doesn’t stop talking about things. That we get used to that, I mean.”

“No, of course. But at his age, he kind of has a right to his own secrets. We shouldn’t try to find out everything about him--then maybe he’d clam up altogether.”

I looked Claire in the eye. My wife, I thought at that moment. Why shouldn’t I call her my wife? My wife. I put my arm around her and pulled her close. Even if only for the duration of this evening. My wife and I, I said to myself. My wife and I would like to see the wine list.

“What are you laughing about?” Claire said. My wife said. I looked at our beer glasses. Mine was empty; hers was still three-quarters full. As usual. My wife didn’t drink as fast as I did, which was another reason why I loved her, this evening perhaps more than other evenings.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was thinking . . . I was thinking about us.”