Customer Reviews

The Dinner Club

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

After Karen moved into the village from Amsterdam with her husband, Michel, and their two daughters, it took her a while to make friends. But finally she found Hanneke, and through her three other woman, and the five of them became fast friends. They dubbed themselves "The Dinner Club" and became a mutual support group--they drank and ate and vacationed together, watched one another's kids. Their husbands did business together. But when the book opens one of their houses is on fire. Someone dies. And the tragedy, together with another which follows shortly afterward, lays bare various truths, among them that the relationships among the members of the Club are more superficial than Karen had supposed. Nor were the members' five marriages as happy as she had supposed.

Saskia Noort's The Dinner Club follows the downward trajectory of the Club's relationships. As things disintegrate, Karen comes increasingly to suspect that the fire was fueled by something more than middle-aged angst and alcohol. The book is filled with a quiet menace, and Noort does a great job of keeping us guessing, our suspicions alighting now on one character, now another. After this slow, steady build-up of tension the book's conclusion, an explosion of violence, is jarring. It doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the book. The conclusion also left me thinking I might have to re-read some chapters to figure out what, precisely, was the truth behind the complex of relationships among the five Dinner Club members and their husbands.

The Dinner Club, which was originally pubished in Dutch in 2004, has been a best-seller in the Netherlands, and film rights to the book have been sold. It would, I think, translate well to the screen.

This is not a literary masterpiece of mystery writing a la Ruth Rendall, but a good summer read.

You can finish it in a few train rides or on the beach.

The characters are at first interesting but become stock figures by the end. The one sour note for me was the obvious dyke stereotype of the female detective (who turned out to be straight) who's character never added anything to the plot except for a cheesy device where she knew one of the other characters because he had cheated her father but there really wasn't any depth to the side story.

Although I've only given the negatives, I still felt it was a worthwhile read. The plot goes back a forth in time and I liked this device for this story, but I would have really wanted more in the way of character development. I believe Ms. Noort has talent and I look forward to reading more novels by her and hope she develops her skills in storytelling.

The inferno destroyed the villa killing wealthy Evert Struyck; his wife Babette was injured but their two children, Luuk and Beau, managed to escape. Babette's four female friends (Karen van de Made, Patricia Vogel, Hanneke Lemstra and Angela Bijlsma) who make up along with her the female part of "the dinner club" couples, try to help the distraught woman. Adding to the shock is that the police found Evert's "farewell" note in his car asking the others for forgiveness leading to the police to conclude suicide.

However, not long afterward Hanneke falls from a hotel balcony. Unable to ignore what is happening to her friends and fearing her family is next, Karen begins to piece together the motive behind the two deaths as she begins to understand that The Dinner Club and its male spousal equivalent are tied not by friendship and caring, but by crime and adultery.

The tale starts off as an extended family drama in which the audience sees how each of the surviving seven members of the Dinner Club and their offspring cope with the first death of one of them though that look is mostly filtered by Karen. Half way into the story, when Karen calls to speak to Hanneke, but instead gets an Amsterdam cop the story line turns into an amateur sleuth mystery. Thus the audience will know the key players at least through the Karen sieve before the thriller kicks into first gear. Well written but somewhat slow at first, this is a fine Dutch mystery.

Harriet Klausner

After finishing this Dutch import, it's not at all clear what took this book to the bestseller list in Holland, nor why anyone would find it necessary to publish it in translation. The back cover asks the reader to: "Imagine Desperate Housewives scripted by Patricia Highsmith." The Desperate Housewives part is dead on, but any comparisons to Patricia Highsmith are purely aspirational and way off the mark in realization.

The story focuses on Karen, a married mother of two who has moved to a village somewhere in the Amsterdam suburbs. She's a self-employed graphic designer, her husband's a TV producer, and they've fled the city for a better life for their children. The story charts their transition to full yuppiedom, as they meet several other white collar city transplants with kids and plenty of cash. Of course all is not well behind the facade of designer clothes, fancy cars, and upscale foodstuffs. When one of their circle dies in a fire apparently of his own devising, doubts, suspicion, and recrimination threatens to destroy the circle of friends, not to mention their own marriages.

The chief problem here is that who cares? A bunch of wealthy yuppies wreck their lives due to their shallow greed and selfish desires. So what? Why should anyone care a whit for their squabbles and self-inflicted misery? We spend page after page with Karen as she agonizes over whether or not to cheat on her husband, whether or not her new friends really like her, which of her new friends is her best friend, etc. This is not thriller material -- this is Sweet Valley High material.

The secondary problem is that the writing is utterly banal (this is not the fault of the translator, who has done some fine work elsewhere). Here's a representative sample of Noort's prose from pages 147-48: "I had no idea what I felt: was I in love with him or just a bored mother longing for risk and adventure? At the same time I was consumed by a fear as violent and stormy as the wind outside. I was as much afraid of _______ as I wanted him, but I was even more afraid of myself, of the feeling that drove me towards him and over which I seemed to have no control. Self-destruction, that's the name of the game I was playing." If you like that sample, well, there's plenty more where it came from.

Finally, the book doesn't have much to offer those of us who read crime from other countries in order to gain insight to foreign cultures. Other than smoking cigars on a regular basis and a propensity to hop on a bike instead of into a cab, the Dutch yuppies at the heart of this book might just as well be living just outside London or Houston, or any number of Western cities. Overall, the paint-by-numbers plotting, utterly shallow characters, and awful prose result in a tremendously disappointing book.

Saskia Noort's The Dinner Club is a blend of mystery and social commentary with a good dash of hard-core romance thrown in. The story begins with an unknown male decrying, with heavy overtones of suicide, his failed marriage and the imminent breakup of his home. The saga then swiftly shifts to the close-knit group of friends known as "The Dinner Club" as they gather outside the burning home of Evert and Babbette and their 2 sons. Evert dies in the fire and, as the remaining friends rally to offer aid and comfort to the family survivors, they immediately accept Babbette's explanation that the psychologically unstable Evert tried to kill them all. Karen and her husband Michel agree to temporarily house Babbette and children after another couple abruptly reneges on their previous offer to do so. Two weeks later Hanneke, Karen's best friend among the group members, dies in a fall from a hotel balcony. While the police raise the possibility of suicide, Karen is convinced Hanneke would never have killed herself and begins questioning other members of their social circle.

As Karen investigates Hanneke's death, she reveals a self-absorbed collection of "beautiful people" whose shared loneliness and isolation in the ex-urbs of Amsterdam has drawn them together. At first, just the wives socialize, but eventually their husbands also become part of the pack. In addition to dinner parties, tennis, European vacations, and elaborate parties to celebrate almost any occasion, the men begin creating business deals with Simon, the handsome alpha-dog financier whom Karen finds irresistibly attractive. As she investigates her friends' deaths, she is shocked by revelations of several affairs among group members and lots of other secrets that make it impossible to know who is telling the truth. Where has the quest for money, power, and social status led these couples? Is one among them a very clever killer?

Noort's first-person narrative, as told by Karen, renders a believably caustic portrayal of female relationships that form in the pressure cooker of suburban elitism. They all strive to project and maintain a facade of perfection: the perfect marriage, the perfect family, the perfect home. Add some steamy sexual encounters and you have a tasty meal if not a gourmet dinner.

The Dinner Club is an appealing mystery whose setting adds a distinctive flavor to the plot but the book should also appeal to non-traditional romance readers. However, devotees of the cozy mystery might want to skip the steamy appetizers and just devour the main course.

The story reads like Amsterdam itself: different, trendy, tolerant and a little bit crazy.
Desperate Houswifes meet Fatal Attraction. If you want to read an American thriller, you should not read this book, if you want to read something different but maybe even better, you should defenitely give it a try!

I agree with a previous reviewer that the writing was sort of banal. It seemed like a true representation of the point of view of the character Karen. And I feel a little unfair in knocking the book for not being something else.

It was interesting to see the depiction of the lives of a certain strata of dutch society. Except for the frequent use of bicycles, things seem pretty much the same as the analogous suburban american social set.

The Dinner Club is another quality offering from Bitter Lemon Press, this one from the Netherlands. It is a well done translation by Paul Vincent from its original Dutch edition.

Life in the suburbs of Amsterdam can be comfortable but also restrictive. When Karen and her family move there for a more peaceful place to raise the children she finds it a lonely existence. Used to her busy days working and taking care of her family, Karen is disturbed by the lack of activity and friends in this small town. So she is thrilled to get to know some of the other women who also live in the area. They quickly become a social group, a dinner club of 5 women and their husbands. They are the upper class of the neighborhood, the comfortably elite with assets and attitude. But when one of the men dies when his house burns down and one of the women falls off the balcony of a hotel, it begins to look like it is not such a happy group after all.

The Dinner Club looks at the under side of suburban life. It is not only a tale of crime, mystery and suspense but also a look at the role social status plays in a small town. It deals with betrayal of business partners, spouses and friends. The plot takes few turns, the ending is not as predictable as one might expect. Each character is a sketch of a role, a piece of the unit that makes up The Dinner Club.