DOCTOR, DOCTOR
Lust, crime and a physician with dubious morals star in Herman Koch’s Summer House With Swimming Pool.
The Dinner, which appeared here last year, was Dutch writer Herman Koch’s international breakthrough (Cate Blanchett has optioned it for her directorial debut). Koch’s publishers are clearly hoping Summer House with Swimming
Pool (his seventh novel, originally published in 2011 in Dutch) will ride on the coattails of that success.
In addition to a vituperative sensibility and (purposefully) off-putting characters, the two novels have a number of structural similarities. Both concern two Dutch families who become involved in an unsettling personal crime.
In The Dinner, the act was committed by the younger teen generation. Here, it is meted upon one of them. Playing heavily on bourgeois resentments and pretensions, Koch leaves us again in the clutches of an unreliable — or at any rate, dubious — first-person narrator.
Dr. Marc Schlosser is a family doctor who, in addition to being narcissistic and sexist, has a chillingly entitled attitude to his work: “In a practice like mine, the key is not to worry too much about medical standards.” Marc also has what most would consider a professional deficit: an aversion to the human body. As a result, much of his time is spent strenuously avoiding touching or looking at his patients, whom he characterizes as a bunch of hypochondriacs and bellyachers.
As the novel begins, Marc has been called to account for a “medical error” that caused the death of Ralph Meier, a famous actor and friend. Or was it an error? Certain signs, like Ralph’s widow Judith spitting in Marc’s face at the funeral, might seem to suggest otherwise.
We then launch into an account of the events that took place after Ralph came to Marc’s office looking for prescription painkillers 18 months previously. At one of Ralph’s performances, Marc had taken note of the hungry, lupine manner with which the actor regarded his wife, Caroline. Nevertheless, it was Ralph’s wife, Judith, who embarked on an affair.
That summer, Marc attempts to engineer a “chance” encounter with Judith by taking Caroline and their two young daughters camping near the Meiers’ Mediterranean summer house. The ploy works — much too the chagrin of Caroline, who finds Ralph loathsome — and the family ends up moving their tent to the Meiers’ lawn.
A kind of bi-generational bacchanal ensues. Marc and Caroline’s daughters play “Miss Wet T-shirt” with Ralph and Judith’s two sons while the adults drink, smoke, bicker and flirt. Ralph’s voracious appetite — which extends equally to food, women and girls — is sharply offset by Marc’s prudish disgust at nudity and cooking smells. At one point he compares nude volleyball players to naked bodies piled in mass graves. Lust, needless to say, seems to play less of a role in his relationship with Judith than control.
When Marc finally gets Judith alone in the kitchen, he realizes they’ve been seen, possibly by his elder daughter Julia. The atmosphere of self-indulgence comes to a full stop later that evening when Julia is discovered on the beach unconscious, presumably violated. As she recalls none of the incident’s particulars, only its traumatic nature, the perpetrator’s identity remains unclear.
It’s as the outraged father of a devastated young girl that Marc seems poised to earn our sympathy. This you should resist. Despite several viable male suspects — including a soft-core movie director, Ralph’s son Alex, and a creepy, tattooed repairman — it’s Ralph himself that Marc sets in his vengeful crosshairs. Though Koch relies, as he did with The
Dinner, on a deus ex machina to stick a wobbly ending, there’s no denying the entertainment value of this titillatingly suspenseful stew of schadenfreude.
Still, there’s something naggingly paradoxical about a novel that ostensibly deconstructs men’s proprietary attitudes to women and girls yet doesn’t give us a single female character worth liking — or, more to the point, loathing.
Emily Donaldson is a freelance critic and
editor.
Herman Koch appears June 8 at Luminato to discuss the unique crime writing emerging from Scandinavia. For info please go to luminatofestival.com.