The Dinner by Herman Koch

Readers of Dutch writer Herman Koch's The Dinner will find an excellent yet disturbing novel divided according to courses served at an upscale restaurant where two brothers and their wives are dining. But from apertif to digestif with the main course and dessert in between, this novel is anything but a story about food.

Rather, it is about two couples who have come together to discuss a horrible crime their teenage sons have committed and what to do -- or not to do -- about it. One brother, Serge Lohman, is a rising politician. The other, a former high school teacher named Paul, is the narrator who readers gradually realize is mentally unbalanced and certainly not a trustworthy relayer of information.

Paul Lohman cannot say his brother's name without disdain in his voice. Neither can Paul describe the waiter's description of the food on their plates without disdain for the waiter with the annoying "pinkie" finger. And Paul cannot talk of his son's crime without criticizing the victim's physical appearance. For  that matter, Paul spends far less time talking about his son's crime than complaining about Serge's social status, about Serge's opinions of the latest Woody Allen movie, even about what Paul speculates is Serge's demeaning attitude toward his wife in the bedroom. For Paul Lohman, a grisly, unprovoked crime is almost a bothersome after-thought, a restaurant tip one might forget and have to return to pay.

The Dinner is not the kind of book readers will enjoy, though it is interesting, even a page-turner at times. It is not a feel-good story or one with  a good ending or even one with any or many likable characters. There are zero laughs, not even a smile, and no places where a realistic reader would even hope things will work out in a way that most people would consider to be right, moral or just. Rather, the question becomes just how awful will the resolution be.

This book is for people who want to read about real people of all kinds, including those who aren't always nice even though they dine in the best restaurants, sit on the front pews, teach our children, run for political offices, know what to say and when to say it, and may even be our relatives or friends.

Rather, it is a book about the intersection of life, death and doing the right, or wrong, thing under the most challenging of circumstances.

The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett

Tell me to read a book, a novel per se, about a woman who is a magician's assistant -- yes, the always-pretty woman who appears to get sawed in half but comes out of the box intact with no legs or arms missing. Tell me the magician is gay, the woman is straight but in love with him, that she even marries him and lives a chaste life with him and his gay lover until they both die and leave her alone to inherit everything. Tell me she finds out -- to her dismay -- that this most cosmopolitan of men has a family in rural Nebraska -- a mom with permed hair and lots of secrets, a sister with an abusive husband, and more. And of course, they're mostly likable folks, ableit a tad strange.

Tell me I'll enjoy this book. Tell me I'll find it plausible. I'd think you were joshing or just plain clueless. But I did enjoy it. I did find it believable -- even a bit too predictable near the end. And, yes, I'd recommend it to you -- well, maybe not to my mother but to you, the people who read my blog and who find it not so incredible that a straight woman might knowingly marry a gay man -- and be happy.

Why should that premise even sound so bizarre? How many marriages between two straight people are based on convenience or need? How many start out based on love or on what the two thought was love but change in a few months or a few years? Maybe those couples are miserable. But I'd argue that not all of them are. Some of those people likely married for other reasons -- money, gratitude, need, companionship, expectations. And perhaps some married for love, but not the kind that's always consummated in the bedroom. Or maybe the reasons for the marriage changed over time with one or both spouses. I'm not saying these arrangements are ideal. But they exist and are probably more prevalent than traditionalists realize.

Patchett, also the author of the critically acclaimed Bel Canto, wrote this less well-known novel in the late 1990s. Her writing is clear, concise, lyrical. "Parsifal is dead. That is the end of the story." Well, maybe not: Those are the book's first two sentences.

This novel is about Sabine, a 40-something magician's assistant who lives in and loves Los Angeles. As the assistant, she's always been the one at the side, the one who stays out of the spotlight. But in Patchett's novel, Sabine takes the spotlight and proceeds to shine it on the other characters she comes to know through Parsifal, the man we never get to meet except through all of the other characters' shared memories.

And the fact that I loved this book, to my own surprise, perhaps speaks to the magic that literature can work in all of us.