Published to mixed reviews in the US last year, the Dutch author Herman Koch’s latest novel, The Ditch, is best enjoyed as a meandering trip through the mind of an ageing, troubled man trying to figure out where he stands in his career, marriage and life. Written with Koch’s characteristic humour and sharp eye, the novel is narrated by Robert Walter, the celebrity – at least in his own head – mayor of Amsterdam. After watching his wife, Sylvia, have a cursory conversation with an alderman at a public event, Robert becomes convinced of an affair. His descent into paranoia makes for an entertaining if sometimes long-winded read.
Uncertainty is the cornerstone of the novel – is Sylvia cheating or is Robert imagining an affair? – and Koch brings it into his narrative in many inventive ways. There is a dizzying number of subplots: Robert’s parents, in their 90s, have decided to kill themselves while they’re still of sound mind and body; his best friend, Bernhard, is a genius with complicated ideas about the finite nature of the universe; his daughter, Diana, loses her cat; and a journalist unearths a photo of Robert as a young man beating up a police officer during protests against the Vietnam war.
In a book that favours long paragraphs, interior monologues and no quotation marks for speech, the style is to mesh all these storylines together and let the reader make the connections themselves. It results in an original treatment of tragedy, particularly in the plot concerning Robert’s parents. The way society deals with its elderly members, even in a seemingly progressive country such as Holland, is made clear by their actions, and by Robert’s straight-talking father: “Old people, they strip us of everything, one thing at a time. The subtext is clear enough: Please, drop dead, you’re only getting in the way.”
Neurotic Robert
The piecemeal way that Robert gives us information obscures many of the narrative strains. Koch dangles clues from the beginning, drawing the reader into Robert’s paranoid state. From the outset we know he’s neurotic, as he comically breaks down Sylvia’s conversation with the alderman, moment by moment, “first from start to finish, then from finish to start”. But Koch also presents many unknowns with his multilayered and engaging protagonist. Is Robert a revered statesman, or simply a man who inflates his own importance?
“The mayor with the human face,” he feels the need to tell us, “that’s what they called me once in a four-page profile in Het Parool.”
Anecdotes about Amsterdam and various visiting, real-life officials are wry and interesting, but the mayor is always at the centre of them. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a narcissist,” he says, giving off strong rays of narcissism. Is he a bigot or a truth-teller, a man who admits that he looks at foreigners with “the naturally suspicious eye of the farmer who sees a stranger entering his yard”?
Is he a shrewd politician who knows how to charm the masses, or a sociopath with a keen sense of how to manipulate: “Only shy people can look so open and candid, I knew that from experience. I had seen that look often enough in the mirror, when I was practicing it.”
Furthering the ambiguity is Koch’s playful way with names and places in the book. Robert gives his wife and daughter fake names, drops clues (among them, a recipe for meatballs) to his wife’s country of origin, and waits until the middle of the book to tell us, “I should first say that I have given myself a different name here too”.
Dinner with Clinton
Readers familiar with Koch's other novels – among them the bestselling The Dinner and Summer House with Swimming Pool – will recognise the writer's talent for depicting complex characters. This new book is also full of his trademark social commentary, from euthanasia to green energy, infidelity to the differences in various European cultures. There are some laugh-out-loud set-pieces. A dinner with a sparkling Bill Clinton stands out, or as Robert himself puts it, "It was one of the rare occasions on which I felt the presence of a personality stronger than my own."
The unnecessary diversions into the mechanics of civic life can be tiresome at times, and although the ambiguity works well for much of the novel, it fails to deliver an impactful ending. But ultimately Koch gets away with his digressions in a story whose charm is in the telling and less so in the discoveries. A playful and fluid translation by Sam Garrett does much to help the book on its way. For all its tangents and phoney tribulations, this is a book firmly rooted in reality: "Happiness, I told myself back then, and I still tell myself today – or perhaps one would do better to speak of satisfaction, rather than happiness – is bound up closely with the acceptance of your own head. Your own body. Your build."
