Summer House with Swimming Pool

Over the past week, I've read The Dinner and Summer House with Swimming Pool back to back, and it was quite an intense experience. As I said in my review of The Dinner, the characters in this book are larger than life (or in this case, more horrible than life), and the book is satirical, but it explores several "taboos" of modern society. It was particularly apt to read it now, following the exposure of certain sex scandals in the entertainment industry - surely the characters of Stanley, the film producer, and his teenage girlfriend Emmanuelle, must have been taken from that source.The narrator is Marc, a doctor, who despises his rich patients, but has found a way to make money out of them without expending too much energy. Marc has an attractive wife, Caroline, and two vapid daughters, Julia and Lisa. One of Marc's patients, Ralph Maier, an actor, invites Marc and his family to their holiday home, and against his better judgement (or is it?), Marc winds up there. Caroline is pursued by Ralph, and Marc amuses himself with Ralph's wife, Judith, who seems to be up for a dalliance. Marc considers himself a "charming" man, although again I suspect this concept is satirical - presumably men like Marc must consider themselves charming and irresistible to women. Julia, the older daughter, has a mild relationship with one of Ralph's sons. Marc professes to love his daughters, and is protective of them, but as the book unfolds, I started to wonder if this was love, or possession. Marc is quite happy to look lustfully at other men's daughters, and there is a rather disturbing scene later in the book where Marc's relationship with Julia seems just a little closer, for a father and teenage daughter, than I'm comfortable with.Ralph is Marc's patient, and he dies under Marc's care. Marc is under investigation for medical negligence, but the suspicion in the mind of the reader is that he may have committed murder. At the end of the book, Marc and his family decamp to the USA, to avoid Marc's malpractice investigation and to live with Stanley, who is in the process of setting up Julia and Lisa as "models". Marc seems fine with this - apparently Julia has now graduated to womanhood, and can be exploited by Stanley and his ilk in the same way as other women are.I love Herman Koch's writing. He's a ruthless observer of human nature, and he doesn't spare the reader. You're left feeling very exposed - could YOU be as bad as these characters if the situation arose? Maybe we're all just a step away!

This novel has a truly excellent scabrous start balanced between awareness that our anti-hero narrator has effectively committed murder and his extremely darkly funny and misanthropic views on the human existence. Halfway through, the plot started getting bogged down and the narrator's musings ditto, but I still kept turning the pages, keen to get to the end. I still had hopes for a strong finish - but very annoyingly, it not only fizzled out but entirely undercut the narrator's motives for murder. So be warned that this is a shaggy dog story. It's a good read but will make you want to throw it across the room at the end.Additionally, it's very clear as it progresses that the author is much, much older than his characters and has very sexist ideas - do either of the wives have jobs? We hear about the husbands' incessantly! No mother of an 11 or 13 year-old girls would let them play "Miss Wet T-Shirt" (!!) with older boys, for instance. And it gets much worse. Anyone against the sexualising of tween and barely-teen girls should avoid this as if it were the plague.

I've worked for most of my life with Dutch colleagues and I love their directness, their lack of guile and their willingness to simply NOT pretend to be something they are not. That sense of Dutchness really comes through in Herman Koch's book 'Summer House with Swimming Pool' in which a thoroughly unpleasant GP meets a totally detestable veteran actor and somehow manages to end up sharing a holiday home with both their families in an attempt to sleep with his patient's wife.There's a fashion at the moment for books with unlikable heroes and SHwSP definitely feeds on that fashion. Marc, the doctor, is openly lazy and disinterested in his privileged clients but has learned how to con them into thinking he's a really good doctor just by giving them longer appointments. Much of those appointments are spent with Marc musing over just how revolting the bodies of his clients are. This book goes into a degree of graphic anatomical grossness that will disturb many readers but is essential to establishing just how unpleasant Marc is.His client has just died at the beginning of the book - so no spoilers there. The book then takes us on a disturbing journey, unlayering the complexities of how the man came to die. Most readers will agree that the actor's death is no great loss. Interestingly - and in some ways similarly to the characters in Koch's better known novel 'The Dinner', there is a common thread of just how far people will go to protect their children.If you need a hero don't buy this book. If you like your protagonists warts and all (and don't mind him musing on where those warts might be) then it could be perfect