The Dinner by Herman Koch (Book Review)

Disclosure of material connection- I received a copy of the book from the publisher via Blogging for Books in exchange for my honest thoughts. I was not required to write a positive review and all opinions stated are 100% my own.

About the book-

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Steve Coogan, Rebecca Hall, and Chloë Sevigny

"A European Gone Girl." —The Wall Street Journal
An internationally bestselling phenomenon, the darkly suspenseful, highly controversial tale of two families struggling to make the hardest decision of their lives—all over the course of one meal.

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. As civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple show just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.

Skewering everything from parenting values to pretentious menus to political convictions, this novel reveals the dark side of genteel society and asks what each of us would do in the face of unimaginable tragedy.

My thoughts-

If  I find a book that is soon to be a movie, something about that book compels me to read it. The Dinner is a novel by Dutch author Herman Koch, it has been translated into several languages and it a best seller. I was curious when I read the plot what the two fifteen year old kids did that their parents would be discussing. Sadly you don't get anywhere near that plot line until half way in the book. I thought that the set up of the book into the different parts of a dinner was interesting, but the book kind of went all over the place. For people who don't like narrators who jump from one time period to another the whole novel this might be confusing. I don't mind it usually and still had trouble keeping up. The set up to the story was slow and I felt like the first half of the book was all about what they were eating rather than why they were at dinner, but once we got to the second half things picked up and the plot got juicy. I had no trouble finishing up the book at that point. If you like books like Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, where there are pretty much zero likeable characters, but the story telling is suspenseful, you will love The Dinner.