There is a high-voltage dinner: the four are together to talk about their children - both couples have a son of fifteen. They have the death of a homeless person on their conscience, but the detectives do not have more than some vague images from a security camera.

The parents are well informed, and while Koch amuses himself with an ingeniously composed plot, his narrator is visited by one probing question after another. Should the two couples cover everything, or indicate their sons? Are they themselves, as parents, responsible? To what extent is aggression genetically determined? And is this then the irrevocable fragmentation of The Happy Family?

Heavy costs, most certainly, but also the satirist Koch is still there: in hilarious passages he settles cassant with the hypocritical outgrowths where chic restaurants are specialized, and in passing he also undermines the lame clean appearance behind which top politicians hide. But the loaded subject never disappears from the pages: there is some grinning, but it is laughing with the handbrake on.

That this book is a pageturner where you can sleep late if necessary, is due to the thriller-like design and the intelligently installed tension arc. That it encourages heated reflection, the carefully weighed moral dilemmas that the author raises. And that this is a book that you carry, one that continues to wander nervously in your head, is due to that unheimliche atmosphere that Koch has sucked in his mind. The continuous suggestion of violence and the omnipresence of fear as a motor for the entire puppet show make you feel uncomfortable as a reader. Like in real life, quoi.

Herman Koch has written a chillingly good book.