Summer House With Swimming Pool – Herman Koch

In Summer House With Swimming Pool, a cynical doctor is facing disciplinary action for a “medical error” – but was it really an error? Or did the doctor act deliberately? Even maliciously? Why would a doctor want one of his patients dead?

I suppose I’m making Summer House With Swimming Pool sound like a medical mystery-thriller, but really it’s a psychosexual drama by Dutch author Herman Koch. My edition was translated into English by Sam Garrett (always name the translator!).

From the very first chapter, the reader knows that general practitioner Dr Marc Schlosser is facing an investigation by the medical board after the death of one of his patients, the famous actor Ralph Meier. Marc was actually at Ralph’s bedside when the man died, and Ralph asked him for forgiveness, before asking him to pass on an apology to “her”. Shortly after Ralph’s death, his wife calls Marc a murderer. Intriguing, no?

The story then circles back to when Ralph first became Marc’s patient, and unfolds from there. Ralph came to Marc because he had heard the doctor had a somewhat lax attitude towards prescribing. The two became almost-friends, with Marc and his family attending a party hosted by Ralph and his family. A casual invitation over drinks sees the two families ultimately ending up sharing the same property on a holiday (thus, the title – summer house with swimming pool).

Again, this could be a fairly simple story: friends and family spend a summer holiday together, until something happens. But there’s a lot of layers to Summer House With Swimming Pool, and Koch takes his time peeling them back.

There’s teenagers experiencing first love, adults contemplating infidelity, fathers suspicious of other men around their daughters (and all of that should give you an idea of the trigger warnings, without giving away Koch’s Big Reveal). All of it is relayed to the reader by Marc, but it’s clear (or it should be) that he’s something of an unreliable narrator. He seems stable and “normal” enough, but his narration reveals a deep bitterness bordering on misanthropy. The reader is privy to the “real” Marc behind the mask he has carefully crafted for his patients and his acquaintances. As he works his way through a slew of red herrings, there’s nothing explicitly suspicious about him – but there’s enough to make the reader question whether we can really trust his version of events.

Summer House With Swimming Pool, as I said, isn’t a mystery or a thriller, but it is a dark stomach-churning kind of novel, one with a lot of moral grey area. It’s one you’ll need to mull over for a while, rather than breezing through it by the pool. Even now, a while after turning the final page, I’m not entirely sure what I think about it or how it makes me feel. I’d imagine it has made good fodder for book clubs, as a conversation about this family drama could stretch late into the night.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Summer House With Swimming Pool:

• “The main character. Has severe. ADD. Or something. Because his thoughts wander. Like crazy. He is not likeable. Or interesting.” – Goldie9
• “while the character development here is pretty good and the narrator is quite amusing in describing all of his many dislikes, when you boil this down there really is no plot. That’s bad for a novel.” – Historian
• “Novels about self-absorbed people who are totally cynical about everyone else hold no appeal for me at all.” – Janette Sheen
• “do you like your books to be full of unrenlenting, long, boring passages about pus and other bodily fluids that do not advance the plot of the book? Do you like to read a book without one likeable character? Do you like books that build up to a complete anticlimax? If so, this is for you.” – jent