Gerard Reve’s 1947 debut novel, a Dutch classic that is only now being published in English translation, carries a blurb in which Herman Koch, author of the 2009 bestseller The Dinner, calls it the “funniest, most exhilarating novel about boredom ever written.”
Is he correct? To be sure, Frits van Egters, Reve’s 23-year-old protagonist, does lead a mundane existence: He has a mind-numbingly dull job as an office clerk, and his parents—with whom he still lives in his (unnamed) hometown—spend their days exchanging vapid remarks about the weather and what’s for dinner and what happened to the keys to the attic. During the period covered by the novel (the last 10 days of 1946) Frits repeatedly looks forward to his evenings, but even these turn out to be nothing to crow about: Mostly he drops in on old school friends, and he has to struggle to find something to say to them.
But boredom? Yes, Frits has moments of boredom. The Evenings‘ first chapter recounts in detail a single day in his life—a day off from work, when he rises early, determined to make something meaningful out of it, only to see it unfold like any other, epic in its banality. As the seconds, minutes, and hours tick by, he deplores the waste of time. But the point isn’t really that he’s bored; it’s that he’s anxious. Here and throughout the novel, Reve, in his consistently simple, straightforward, pitch-perfect prose (translated splendidly by Sam Garrett), shares with us every last detail of Frits’s experience: his actions, thoughts, memories, dreams, bodily sensations, and observations of other people’s sartorial choices, anatomical anomalies, and behavioral tics. And what becomes increasingly clear is that he’s not bored—he’s a nervous wreck, riddled with self-doubt and self-scrutiny.
His mind never stops whirring. (“I am,” he reflects, “all nerves.”) At home with his parents, he compulsively studies, and deplores, their empty chatter, vulgar eating habits, and unsightly physical attributes. Out with his old school friends, desperate to fill the silence, he teases them for growing bald and rattles off jokes and stories and commentaries on their lives even as he’s inwardly chastising himself for being tedious.
As the novel proceeds, moreover, his anxiety takes on added depth and dimension. Increasingly, he makes references to God, morality, and mortality that at first come off as jocular, but gradually feel more serious: “God sees all things. . . . God is the beginning and the end of all things.” One soon becomes aware that this novel, while set in the aftermath of World War II and the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, contains virtually no references to that recent history. At one point we learn that someone was “stationed” in a certain place; a boy is identified as having eaten meals with Frits’s family “for the duration.” Not until page 208 is the war explicitly mentioned, when Frits cites recent headlines about exploding grenades and the like as examples of “[d]eferred suffering from the war.”
And that’s precisely what this novel is about: not boredom, but what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Frits isn’t the only one in his circle suffering from it. He and an old classmate, Maurits, who’s become a small-time crook, share a morbid taste for imagining aloud, in grisly detail, how they would carry out an act of torture and murder. Frits, who has horrifically detailed dreams about corpses and traffic accidents, talks with clinical specificity about mutilating bugs; one of his chums is cruelly abusive toward a dog. These young people’s conversations consist largely of anecdotes, invariably shared with glee, about macabre events they’ve witnessed or heard about, and dark humor about such subjects as decapitation, the impending death of a neighbor, the possibility that someone’s toddler son has a mental disability, and what it would be like to wake up inside a coffin underground.
When Frits and a group of buddies go out for the evening, he’s surprised that one of them, Jaap, has left his infant child alone at home. “And what if there is a fire?” Frits asks. Jaap replies, “The child will suffocate before the fire reaches him. It is not such a big deal.”
These are, in short, deeply wounded people. Their entire youth has been defined by war and occupation, and they all need professional help. But even in this crowd, Frits stands out. All his friendships are purely platonic; not once, even fleetingly, does he evince a romantic or sexual impulse. Sometimes he seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, to be inhabiting a mental state just this side of pure madness. Incapable of tackling his trauma, of talking it out, of addressing it head-on, he leads a life of quiet desperation, often babbling aloud to himself and endlessly picking at his own emotional scabs.
In his single (plainly unconscious) effort at self-therapy, he borrows a toy rabbit from a female friend: “Sweet, isn’t it?” he says. “Sweet little rabbit. He’s sweet. It always brings tears to my eyes, every time I see it.” Taking the stuffed animal home, he kisses it, talks to it, sheds a tear—then suddenly, savagely, bites out a chunk of wool: “Symbol of beneficence, beast of atonement,” he pronounces, in the artificially heightened language he often affects, and indeed, the bunny is at once a token of his lost childhood, an emblem of prewar innocence, and a reminder (in the midst of the Christmas season, yet) of the sea of faith that within the lifetimes of Frits’s own parents has receded from the naked shingles of the Netherlands shore.
In The Evenings, Gerard Reve (1923-2006)—a fervent anti-Communist and Roman Catholic convert who is often described as the first openly gay Dutch novelist—has left us a work that is, by turns, poignant, chilling, disquieting, and (yes, Herman Koch is right about this) laugh-out-loud funny. The novel’s near-perverse blend of flavors and feelings, its unsettling admixture of the comic and tragic, and its laser focus on a hero who’s alternately appealing and appalling, are typical of Reve, who’s best known in America for his lurid 1981 thriller The Fourth Man—or more accurately, for Paul Verhoeven’s much-admired 1983 film adaptation.
Named in an NRC Handelsblad poll as one of the top 10 Dutch-language novels of all time and by the Society for Dutch Literature as the best Dutch novel of the century, The Evenings should have found its way into English decades ago. Koch suggests in his blurb that if it had appeared in English in the 1950s, “it would have become every bit as much a classic as On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye.”
Could be—although, despite the obvious common theme of alienated youth, The Evenings doesn’t particularly recall either of those items from the midcentury canon. Other books come to mind, though: Frits’s hilariously vacuous suppertime exchanges with his parents recall the inane blather around the dinner table in Great Expectations, when the visiting Uncle Pumblechook speaks of Pip as “improving himself with [the] conversation” of his “elders and betters.” And for this reader, anyway, Reve’s plotless, obsessively meticulous account of one neurotic soul’s moment-to-moment existence brings to mind an international bestselling novel of very recent vintage—namely, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle, a favorite with many offbeat young readers.
Is it possible that Knausgaard enthusiasts will discover, and embrace, The Evenings? Let’s hope so. With any luck, it may yet become the well-deserved classic in English that it already is in Dutch.
Bruce Bawer is the author, most recently, of The Alhambra: A Novel.
