![]() Whatever else he may be, likable he is not. The success of “The Dinner” depends, in part, on the carefully calibrated revelations of its unreliable and increasingly unsettling narrator, Paul Lohman. But of course in the Netherlands, the vituperative Austrian Thomas Bernhard remains popular, whereas in the United States he is the acquired taste of a cultish few. “The Dinner,” the newly translated novel by the Dutch writer Herman Koch, has been a European sensation and an international best seller. Surely what actually matters is that characters clear this vital hurdle: that they be interesting. This preference is strange, given that few real people are thoroughly nice and that those few aren’t interesting. North American readers care inordinately that fictional characters be likable.
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