The Yecch Factor 
 The Dinner, Koch's runaway success in 2012, worked because it started as a satire and morphed into something darkly evil, from which nobody emerged blameless. Opening as a wittily vitriolic look at the lives of the rich and powerful, over dinner at an ultra-swank Amsterdam restaurant, it soon involved the teenage children of one of the diners and an offstage crime that is all the more horrible for never being brought into the full light. It also worked because it was so compact, feeling much shorter than its actual length, basically a three hours' journey into night. Summer House with Swimming Pool, Koch's latest to be translated here (seamlessly, by Sam Garrett) has the same combination of luxury and disgust, but though a mere 50 pages longer, it is not at all compact, but episodic and confused. Fatally so. 
 Marc Schlosser is a general physician whose clientele consists mainly of successful figures in the arts. One of his patients is the celebrated stage actor Ralph Meier who has recently died, following international television success playing the Emperor Augustus. There is some suggestion that the actor's death may have involved malpractice on Marc's part.... 
 Most of the rest of the book is played in flashback over the previous year or two, as Marc and his wife Caroline become friends with Ralph and his wife Judith, eventually joining them in a rented summer house (with swimming pool) somewhere on the Mediterranean. The Schlossers have two daughters, 11 and 13, who are obviously interested in the Meiers' two sons of similar age. Less appropriately, Marc is clearly attracted to Judith, and Ralph seems positively carnivorous when he looks at Caroline. Add a Hollywood director and his nymphet girlfriend a third of his age, and you have the recipe for sexual tension that you could slather around with a trowel. 
 But too much of it. It is simply unfocused. The events of those few days by the beach soon become very hard to disentangle, and the novel flounders. Chapter after chapter with something like "I have often wondered later if things would have turned out differently if..." screwing up the tension to some climax that, though terrible enough when it comes, seems a strange match for all the hints we had been given before. Another problem is that Koch, who presumably realized that sick sells, loses no time painting at least his male characters with tar. Marc tells us immediately that his work as a doctor is largely show; he hates the human body, and describes procedures such as a prostate examination in ways calculated to turn the stomach. So when later we are supposed to see him as a sympathetic character, it is difficult to do so; the yecch factor continues throughout the entire book. His actions after the said climax are hard to believe, and although Koch keeps throwing in new plot twists almost to the end, I found I could no longer keep track of them. And no longer cared.