'Dear Mr. M' A Jarring Mystery Without a Clear Conscience

By the time Herman Koch’s protagonist chillingly invokes 9/11 in the final act of his unsettling “Dear Mr. M,” the Dutch novelist has already stacked a stunning number of familiar macabre tropes upon one another. A very partial sampling, in roughly chronological order: An unknown stalker writes lascivious letters to a famous author; a drunken 30-something stalks the gorgeous high school senior with whom he briefly had an affair; a cynical teen laughs while filming the sudden death of his physics teacher; and an aging megalomaniac belligerently defends his Nazi-sympathizing father. Taken as discrete plot developments, these moments feel trite at best, constants of a postmodern mystery landscape that aims more towards peddling pastiche than conjuring something new. Koch, however, is so capable a literary technician that he somehow manages to mold his collection of clichés into an enigmatic and unique intrigue that is simultaneously political and timeless, pulpy and profound.

The reader first glimpses Koch’s curmudgeonly protagonist, the titular Mr. M—a literary titan whose glory days are behind him—through the lens of the author’s downstairs neighbor. This creepy voyeur, about whom Koch reveals virtually nothing for the first half of the book, addresses a series of prying letters to the septuagenarian author, commenting on the beauty of Mr. M’s much younger wife while picking apart the bourgeois routine into which the once-creative wordsmith has fallen. The neighbor is at times unrelentingly cruel, bluntly criticizing the writer’s “mediocre intelligence,” highlighting obnoxious quotes from his most self-serving interviews, and even detailing the complicated means by which he plans to weasel his way into Mr. M’s apartment, summer home, and mail. At first glance, Koch’s novel seems like a by-the-book (if not particularly sordid) epistolary thriller, in which the breathless reader hopes that Mr. M can pacify his obsessive neighbor before the maniac kills his whole family!

Koch, however, tends to operate in a far more meta-modern mode. The author’s immensely popular 2009 novel, “The Dinner,” begins in a similarly clichéd form—a lurid dinner conversation between four morally ambiguous individuals relayed by a middle-aged history teacher—before devolving into a complex interior game of unreliable narrators and constantly shifting perspectives. Formal unpredictability is arguably the main attribute that has elevated Koch to such a vaunted position in the genre. In “Dear Mr. M,” it’s difficult to explain just how Koch architects his move away from his initial “found letter” cat-and-mouse game without revealing too many of the twists that make the book so exhilarating. Broadly, Koch complicates the opening section with a novella-length 1970s flashback sequence, which plays out a sinister love triangle between the letter-writer; his high school girlfriend, Laura; and a charming teacher at the school, who disappears under suspicious circumstances. To further fracture any sense of genre tradition, Koch reveals that Mr. M wrote his most popular novel as a speculative true-crime episode about the unsolved case.

So the neighbor has tracked down a literary enemy who misrepresented him in a famous work, has moved in downstairs, and is planning to take his sweet revenge to the tune of Koch’s slimy and salacious prose? No, not even close. In fact, Koch reveals in the early goings that the letter-writer’s becoming Mr. M’s neighbor was actually a coincidence: “In a novel, it would be completely implausible. Too much of a coincidence…. There’s only one place in which we accept coincidence, and that is in reality.” Let the meta games begin! For the rest of the book, Koch teases the reader with more of these morsels of literary theory, slyly commenting on his own plot developments and shifts in perspective as he tests the reader’s patience for ambiguity. Is Herman a killer? Is Mr. M in danger, or is he also hiding something? Who is actually in control of the narrative? Is Koch himself intentionally manipulating his reader to a degree that entirely undermines any coherent plot?

And then there’s 9/11, used as an extended metaphor that perhaps most acutely captures Koch’s modus operandi, his impressive ability to create confound readers’ expectations over large swaths of text. Koch prints the entirety of an interview that Mr. M gives comparing his writing to the World Trade Center catastrophe: “There is a fifteen-minute gap, a naïve eternity, between the first plane and the second…. As a writer, I’m much more interested in those minutes …. The naïve belief in the accident.” In his slow revelation that the neighbor is the subject of Mr. M’s novel, his conflicting versions of the 1970s love triangle, and his constant interior comment on the ridiculousness of the genre in which he is trapped, Koch plays on the assumption that someone will explain it all away eventually, that what looks like a morass of confusion will become a clear struggle between good and evil.

The only problem with Koch’s fascinating intertextual machinations is that his characters are repulsive to a degree that it becomes increasingly difficult to find common ground with them or trust their perspectives. The neighbor is a certifiable sadist regardless of whether or not he’s capable of killing, Mr. M is full of hot air, and the women in the book are rendered so lifeless by the male protagonists that it is hard to tell whether the sexism comes from the characters or, far more problematically, from Koch himself. Koch ties everything up and does so with flair, but readers are still left wondering whom to trust, why they were taken on such a ride, and whether humans are just downright nasty. But even this limitation appears intentional. After all, 9/11 wasn’t an accident but rather an endlessly confusing mess of ideologies and perspectives that continues to torture us 15 years on. It’s a gutsy metaphor for a mystery author to make about the trajectory of his own text, but with a novel this haunting it somehow works.