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The Dinner Club (Paperback)

by Saskia Noort (Author)
3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
RRP: £9.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 276 pages
  • Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press (2 Jan 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1904738206
  • ISBN-13: 978-1904738206
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.4 x 2.5 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 453,304 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

"Are you a Nicci French fan? Then read The Dinner Club." Beau Monde "A thrilling read." De Telegraaf "An exciting novel that is also a morality tale laced with biting satire." Het Parool

Product Description

On a cold winter's night, an elegant villa goes up in flames. Evert Struyck, happily married, father of two and successful business man, dies in the fire. His wife, Babette and the children manage to escape. Babette is part of a group of five women, known as "the dinner club", who meet regularly and whose husbands do business together. Karen, a dinner club member, takes Babette into her house after the fire, but soon discovers that the friendships in the dinner club are not as unconditional as they seem. It becomes clear that some people have benefited from Evert's death. Within weeks another member of the club falls from the balcony of a hotel and dies. Karen starts to put the pieces together. White-collar crime, fraud and adultery are the putrefying glue that has kept the dinner club together. Not for much longer. Set in a world of affluent suburbs, flashy 4x4's and country clubs, familiar to readers in the UK and the US, "The Dinner Club" is a psychological thriller about a group of people desperately hanging on to the outer varnish of their lives. Some of them will defend their material success at any price. Imagine "Desperate Housewives" scripted by Patricia Highsmith. That's "The Dinner Club".
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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.2 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Saskia Noort - The Dinner Club, 25 Feb 2007
By RachelWalker "RachelW" (England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   
This novel was a bestseller in the Netherlands, and it's easy to see why. It's a short, stylishly written thriller, sexy and easy to read, about a gorup of socialites (the "dinner club") whose well-off lives threaten to collapse in the face of one of their number comitting suicide (by setting fire to his house with himself and his family still inside), and the secrets that seem to be lying somewhere beneath the surface. After all, there's nothing we like better than to see those better off suffering, even if only in fiction. No wonder it was a bestseller, then!

It's an easy read; it's a *good* read, and it's a good enough thriller. It's vague tartness probably aims to make up for what it lacks, in terms of being a crime novel, to make it great, but is, in the end, too superficial to really leave you with anything lasting. There's little character development, and few of them feel really real (apart, slightly, from the protagonist, and her friend Hanneke (who goes missing soon after the initial suicide), who is excellently drawn, and continues to loom over the book even after she is largely gone), but they're easy to swallow, and it's nice to know that, in a novel such as this, well-off types like this may well get their just deserts! (Shallow portraits of shallow people? It could be intentional, but I doubt it: Noort isn't a good enough writer.) The groups dynamics within the dinner club, though, are interestingly done, and the vague Bacchanalia of it all adds a nice bit of atmosphere. The final solution, too, is good. As is what Noort says about the characters rather materialistic, quite fatuous lives, the way they live and think. It would be good satire if Noort was a satirists, otherwise it's just a social commentary (albeit one that's been made by many others many times before) that adds another small layer to a good, but not particularly special, thriller. Buy it for the beach, I think. It could be a lot better, but it's an easy, very entertaining read that pretty much everything it sets out to (with varying degrees of competence, of course).

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Tremendously Disappointing, 14 Feb 2007
By A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
After finishing this Dutch import, it's not at all clear what took this book to the bestseller list in Holland, nor why anyone would find it necessary to publish it in translation. The back cover asks the reader to: "Imagine Desperate Housewives scripted by Patricia Highsmith." The Desperate Housewives part is dead on, but any comparisons to Patricia Highsmith are purely aspirational and way off the mark in realization.

The story focuses on Karen, a married mother of two who has moved to a village somewhere in the Amsterdam suburbs. She's a self-employed graphic designer, her husband's a TV producer, and they've fled the city for a better life for their children. The story charts their transition to full yuppiedom, as they meet several other white collar city transplants with kids and plenty of cash. Of course all is not well behind the facade of designer clothes, fancy cars, and upscale foodstuffs. When one of their circle dies in a fire apparently of his own devising, doubts, suspicion, and recrimination threatens to destroy the circle of friends, not to mention their own marriages.

The chief problem here is that who cares? A bunch of wealthy yuppies wreck their lives due to their shallow greed and selfish desires. So what? Why should anyone care a whit for their squabbles and self-inflicted misery? We spend page after page with Karen as she agonizes over whether or not to cheat on her husband, whether or not her new friends really like her, which of her new friends is her best friend, etc. This is not thriller material -- this is Sweet Valley High material.

The secondary problem is that the writing is utterly banal (this is not the fault of the translator, who has done some fine work elsewhere). Here's a representative sample of Noort's prose from pages 147-48: "I had no idea what I felt: was I in love with him or just a bored mother longing for risk and adventure? At the same time I was consumed by a fear as violent and stormy as the wind outside. I was as much afraid of _______ as I wanted him, but I was even more afraid of myself, of the feeling that drove me towards him and over which I seemed to have no control. Self-destruction, that's the name of the game I was playing." If you like that sample, well, there's plenty more where it came from.

Finally, the book doesn't have much to offer those of us who read crime from other countries in order to gain insight to foreign cultures. Other than smoking cigars on a regular basis and a propensity to hop on a bike instead of into a cab, the Dutch yuppies at the heart of this book might just as well be living just outside London or Houston, or any number of Western cities. Overall, the paint-by-numbers plotting, utterly shallow characters, and awful prose result in a tremendously disappointing book.
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5.0 out of 5 stars An interesting and compelling read, 22 Nov 2009
By C. S. Thompson (UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Really enjoyed this novel. Not as indicated on the blurb "A desperate housewives", but actually an intriguing and exciting read which kept me guessing until the last chapter.
Set in Amsterdam there are a few Dutch references which needed an internet search to explain but that just added to the experience of the novel. Will definitely read more by this author
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Suffocating family drama
Saskia Noort's suffocating novel Dinner Club has no pretension to local colour. She deals with the power dynamics among five yuppy couples who find themselves allied against the... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Feanor

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