The titular dinner forms the background for the story.
Brothers Paul and Serge, with their respective wives Claire and Babette, meet at a trendy restaurant where, we are told blandly, they are going to discuss their teenage children.
Paul and Claire have one son, Michel; Serge, a politician expected to win the forthcoming election and become Holland's prime minister, and Babette have a natural son, Ricky, and an adopted African boy, Beau.
So far, so mundane.
Initially, Koch's target appears to be not so much the two couples as the trendy restaurant, which he dissects with quick slashes of his pen and is, for those of us who prefer fish and chips heaped in greasy paper to the barren plates of nouvelle cuisine, extremely funny. But soon cracks begin to appear, not in the plates but in the characters, none of whom is quite the person he or she seemed at first.
For a couple of chapters, the flaws seem minor but gradually one becomes more uneasy: the jokes are fewer, the flaws grow uglier. Slowly racism slithers insidiously into the picture, followed by violence against social derelicts and, finally, murder. As the dinner progresses, alliances between the four adults form and soon split, to be quickly replaced with new pairings.
And at the end, the waiters can sweep away the debris from the dinner table but, like the story of Humpty Dumpty, no-one can piece together the broken lives of the diners.
It would be quite wrong to say this was a dinner that left a nasty taste but it does leave the reader with an awful lot of questions to ask of themselves.
• Geoffrey Vine is a Dunedin journalist and Presbyterian minister.
