Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch

Published in the Netherlands in 2014; published in translation by Hogarth on September 6, 2016

Dear Mr. M is one of those books that substitutes initials for the names of certain people and places. That’s fine if you’re Kafka but it’s a little precious when most modern writers adopt the technique. Still, I think it suits the narrator.

M is a literary novelist living in the Netherlands who has had some success but his luster is fading. During interviews, he is grilled not about his books, but about the inglorious role his father played in the Second World War. It is that past, perhaps, that compels M to write so many books about the war.

PartS of Dear Mr. M are narrated by M’s downstairs neighbor, who is rather obsessed with M and his family. The neighbor doesn’t think much of M, but the reliability of his opinions is suspect. On the other hand, M does seem to be petty and shallow and vindictive. He also defends indefensible views. So is he a good person or a bad person? When he defends his writing at book signings, he says he avoids stereotyping by creating characters who are mixtures of good and bad. M is probably just such a mixture, as are most people. But who is the narrator and why is he obsessed with M? Initially nameless, the neighbor’s identity becomes apparent after the book shifts gears.

The shift occurs when the story, now told in the third person, begins to follow students who are suspected of complicity in the disappearance of a history teacher who is rumored to have been overly affectionate with his female students. This lengthy section of the novel is presented as a “true” story upon which M based his most famous novel. A skinny kid who has attracted the most beautiful girl in his class is the dynamic that attracted M’s attention, but M’s novel omitted another girl who is either a friend or rival of the beautiful girl. This section of Dear Mr. M is rich with the jealousies and alliances and insecurities of teens, although it sacrifices plot development for character development.

The sections that follow alternate between M’s present and the past story of the missing teacher. The past and present are eventually connected. Saying anything else about the plot would risk spoiling it, so I’ll leave it at that.

Like many books that feature a writer as a main character, Dear Mr. M is in part about the process of writing. Parts of the book, in fact, seem designed to expose the pettiness of writers, their obsession with sales figures and status within the community of writers. Herman Koch portrays writers as back-stabbers with swollen egos, a description that pretty much defines a subset of any profession. While the extended discussions of imaginary writers were a little too self-referential to hold my interest, M’s self-destructive behavior is entertaining, if only because it is satisfying to imagine that obnoxious people might pay some price for their bad behavior.

In an interview, M explains his departures from reality in his construction of fiction. Those choices are central to the plot. The novel’s conceit (writers steal from and transform reality, but should they pay a price when they borrow from the lives of real people?) is clever, and the payoff at the story’s end makes the novel worth reading. Unfortunately, reaching that payoff requires the reader to wade through descriptions of teenage anxieties that are longer than necessary to set the stage for the ending.

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