In The Dinner, a novel by Herman Koch, set in modern-day Holland, two fifteen-year-old cousins assault a homeless woman on their way home from a party one night. The primary culprit, Michel, displays very troubling behavior when both security camera footage and his personal cell phone footage show him enjoying the action. The security camera footage is played over local and international news stations, both the security camera and personal cell phone videos are posted to the internet, and the whole world gets to watch in horror as two “punk teenagers” set an innocent lady on fire. The whole story is told by Michel’s father, Paul, as he sits through a long, uncomfortable dinner with his wife, Claire, and brother and sister-in-law, Serge and …show more content…
After Claire had been hospitalized, Paul tries to continue on his and Michel’s lives as normal as possible; he says that he makes sure they have clean laundry and home-cooked meals, and that he tries especially hard to make Michel feel that everything is going to be alright. However, when Serge and Babette arrive to check on Michel, they find Paul cooking dinner and Michel in his disgustingly unkempt room, sitting on the floor, playing with his toys. They assume that he must be scared out of his mind about his mother’s condition, and see what they believe to be a household falling to pieces. When they confront Paul, Paul starts to lose his temper and asks them to leave in the exact same tone that he used when he threatened the shop owner. When they do not leave, and instead, continue to talk to him and push him to let them take Michel home with them for a while. Suddenly, he remembers the dinner he had been cooking, and when he runs in to the kitchen to find it burning on the stove, his temper snaps and he grabs the cast-iron skillet with his bare hands beats Serge in the head with it multiple times. Michel witnesses this entire incident, and it further reinforces Michel’s vision that anybody crossing his path with notions that “don’t belong,” like Serge and Babette asking to take a grown man’s son into temporary custody for arguably no reason whatsoever, can be met with