Herman Koch - Summer House with Swimming Pool

 

I was keen to read Koch's new book because I really enjoyed The Dinner, which is a highly original, thought-provoking and ultimatey disturbing read. It shouldn't surprise me that Summer House with Swimming Pool is also disturbing. Or that, as with The Dinner, we don't find out what the crime is that lies at the heart of the novel until three quarters of the way through. But what did surprise me was just how hateful most of the characters are.

Koch is a good writer, but after reading this, his latest, book, I feel that he may not be a very nice person. His protagonist here, the good doctor Marc Schlosser, is really rather detestable. He has a distaste for the human body and the wellbeing of his patients is more or less irrelevant to him. He has built up a stable of patients well-known in the creative arts by turning a blind eye to their foibles (too much alcohol? Pfft, he says, many people drink too much and live long ), and by liberally doling out prescription drugs.

It is through his work that Marc meets Ralph Meier, an ego-driven actor who looks at women in a way that disgusts even Marc. Through a series of social occasions, Ralph's family and Marc's become friendly and end up, eventually, holidaying together. Here, at a summer house with a swimming pool, events unfold that cause Marc to behave in a manner contradictory to the hippocratic oath he has taken, and which land him in the quandary he is in when we meet him at the beginning of the novel: on the verge of possibly losing his medical licence, not through some mistake, but through a conscious and deathly serious infraction, the consequences of which he was well aware.

The story unfolds persuasively, but the book is too long, and the characters too distasteful. The nuances that made The Dinner a hit are largely absent here, though the final twist (it is no spoiler to say there is one) packs a punch.

The only redeeming feature of Koch's protagonist is his love for his daughters, and the way he speaks of drawing closer to his wife in a crisis. But even these characteristics are insufficient to keep one's skin from crawling after placing the book down.

Koch is clever, there's no doubt about that, but this book has persuaded me that there is no need for me to read the rest of his oeuvre.

Overall assessment: 3 out of 5. A good read if you can stomache it. And note that it took me a good quarter of the novel before I was drawn in to the story.