SUMMER HOUSE WITH SWIMMING POOL - Herman Koch - Fiction

After THE DINNER, Herman Koch has a plan: stories of families committing acts that are deeply wrong while raising their children, hating their societally-revered jobs, and underestimating their spouses. It's a great formula. Top-notch formula. Even using only one of the three can make a very successful story. Gillian Flynn did "committing acts that are deeply wrong while underestimating a spouse"; John Banville's done "committing acts that are deeply wrong while hating societally-revered job" (and a lot of other 'bad cop' thrillers), and Shirley Jackson to Stephen King have shown us "raising children while committing unspeakable acts".

For his hat trick, Koch uses Marc Schlosser, a Dutch family doctor who hates listening to his patients but distinguishes his practice by the amount of time he listens to his patients; he hates attending theatre productions and movies but his patients are primarily artists, and he is invited to many, and attends. Marc is characterized by overreaction and a false sense of social perceptiveness. He hates going to the theatre--really, really hates it, beyond all reflection of its actual tedium. He hates caring for human bodies, particularly ill ones, although he admits a certain pleasure in performing rectal exams upon the wary. He hates--really, really hates--camping, but acquiesces to it for his wife, who loves it. He also hates the smells of animals, and the way men look at women, and the way specialists condescend to family doctors. He's like the anti-Hannibal Lecter; Hannibal hated rudeness but had the intellect and the societal acumen to back it up, but Marc just hates being around people who aren't him.

Marc has an odd mentor in a disgraced medical school professor of his, who had some unorthodox ideas about the purposes of sexual desire. Probably these excerpts from the professor's lectures are meant to be shocking, but I can only imagine them being delivered by a doddering, senile lecturer being mostly ignored by his students. The professor is such an old-timey villain. He probably hates interracial couples, and the Jews.

Marc does love his daughters, Lisa and Julia, not to the extent that he would alter his vacation plans to encompass activities they would like, or do much more than smile benightedly over their hijinks with boys, until tragedy befalls them, but certainly he loves them, and overreacts to protect them, and suffers from an inability to understand how they feel about him, or what their plans are.

At the beginning of the action, Marc has been invited to the opening night of a play starring Ralph, one of his patients, and pretty much a lothario. Ralph leers at Marc's wife, and Marc suddenly gets an idea--two can play at that game! Ralph also has a wife, Judith, and Marc, who has apparently never had the idea of infidelity before and is curiously inept at it, sets his sights on her. He goes about this rather like his teenage daughters, planning an entire family vacation around hoping to run into Judith at the summer house where she and Ralph will be vacationing. As someone who used to plan her school hallway route to 'happen' to pass by the classroom of a certain boy, I'm familiar with this tactic, but it's fairly transparent, as it is immediately to Caroline, Marc's wife. Why are we staying at this horrid campground run by a man who tortures animals and is probably a serial killer, Caroline thinks. Oh, of course, because Marc said it would be nice and also because Judith and Ralph are here. Caroline is willing to give Marc the benefit of the doubt, and so the two families are drawn together, with the nice addition of a Roman Polanski duo, a Dutchman turned American film director, Stanley, and his very young model/actress girlfriend, Emmanuelle.

Ralph and Judith happen to have two sons well-matched in age to Marc's daughters, and with the full summer contingent the sexual tensions are too much for Marc to process. He apparently doesn't realize that Judith is cavorting with Stanley while also leading him on, and doesn't see Ralph's somewhat predatory attentions toward all the women present everywhere until it's too late. It really seems that Marc is coming to terms with his sexuality late in life; there's a charmingly awkward scene in which he tries to convince a leasing agent to fix the water in Ralph's summer house by hitting on her. The tenor of his "hitting on her" is "you're very pretty, please do what I want." Marc is no match in sophistication for Ralph; his only trump card is that he's a doctor, and he waits patiently to be able to play it.

The climax of the novel comes when most of the two families go down to the beach to set off fireworks. I don't recall exactly what holiday they're celebrating--they're not in the US, but it seems to be around the 4th of July--and Julia goes off with Alex, who returns to his mom and Marc crying; he has lost her. Marc searches the beach bar where she had gone with Alex, and then finds her by the shoreline, seemingly washed up onto the beach. By some markings on her legs, he concludes that she was attacked and raped. He gives her a cursory examination but begins to believe that someone with them--Ralph? Stanley? The crazy dutchman in charge of their former campground, who he ran off the road while driving to the beach? Alex himself?--is responsible. He refuses to take Julia to the cops, and the family leaves early in the morning, sneaking off unnoticed by all but Ralph's mother-in-law.

Marc settles his suspicions quickly and firmly on Ralph, based on the evidence that (a) Ralph is a pervert, (b) Ralph played a game with his daughters (and his sons) that involved pretending to pull off their bathing suit bottoms, and (c ) Ralph tried to hit on his wife, so why not. I think the evidence against Ralph is less than air-tight. I would have suspected the crazy campground Dutchman; he had the motive (revenge for running him off the road) and the opportunity (he apparently snuck down to the beach after the car accident, and would have been in the vicinity of the beach club before Marc and Judith find Alex and Julia). On the other hand, Ralph tries to divert blame in a deathbed "confession" that Alex was in on a plan to let Julia hook up with a repairman she met at the beach house; according to him she had sex with the repairman and then staged her "attack" and allowed herself to be discovered on the beach so as not to raise her parents' suspicions. This seems far-fetched; this plan, if it was one, brought much more attention to Julia than she had attracted thus far, and she had no way of knowing that her parents wouldn't take her to the police. Ralph also explains Julia's attraction to the repairman as her "liking older men" which is just not true from everything we've seen of Julia. So, is Ralph making this up to deflect suspicion? Did Alex make it up? Is Julia just a trouble-maker intent on ruining her family's vacation? None of these theories seems implausible, which is the beauty of the off-kilter worlds Koch creates. Isn't any one of us capable of the worst? And who is watching to make sure we behave?