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The Dutch long had great confidence in their state, whose army of social and physical engineers could be trusted to shield citizens from hardship and to protect the huge amounts of reclaimed land (60 percent of the national territory) against flooding. Plainspoken and direct, the citizens of the Netherlands routinely assert the superiority of a national culture that—they claim—values individual freedom, mutual tolerance, state-managed solidarity, and a matter-of-fact common sense blissfully devoid of hang-ups, unnecessary moral restrictions, or artificial social niceties. No wonder they tend to come across as arrogant. Still, Dutch arrogance is not what it used to be. As cultural and political shifts have fueled new anxieties, collective self-confidence in the Netherlands has crumbled. Today, the bungling Dutch government no longer seems able to solve any of the country’s most urgent problems, let alone protect its citizens. Trust in politics has tanked. Close to a third of voters now support the far right.
This disoriented, anxiety-ridden version of the Netherlands is the backdrop to the two novels under review here: Gerbrand Bakker’s The Hairdresser’s Son (De kapperszoon, 2022), translated for Archipelago by David Colmer, and Marijke Schermer’s In het oog (Eyes on you, 2024), not yet translated into English. In many ways, the two protagonists—Simon and Nicola, respectively—embody everything the Dutch are proud of: they are sexually liberated, open-minded, common-sensical, individualistic, and direct. Yet although they are fascinating, even magnetic characters, they are not exactly sympathetic. If anything, they are eerie—all the more so because their unsettling behavior forces the reader to confront three of the main concerns that keep the Netherlands up at night.
Over the past couple of years, these anxieties have sparked such intense political and cultural debate that they approach the level of moral panic. While all three are local responses to global developments, in the Netherlands they have taken on a peculiar shape. The words the Dutch use to refer to them—verpreutsing, bestaanszekerheid, and grensoverschrijdend gedrag—are not easy to translate, although,literally, they would mean something like “prudification,” “existential security,” and “boundary-crossing behavior.”
The first term, prudification, encompasses everything from a perceived rise in discomfort around public nudity—topless sunbathing, kids showering together after gym class—to the fact that younger generations are increasingly postponing their first sexual experience. According to those raising the alarm, such conservative norm shifts suggest that Dutch culture is regressing or even losing its soul. The culprits they point to are generally foreign: be it a kind of “woke” puritanism drifted in from the United States or traditional religious taboos imported by immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, who insist on hiding their bodies.
The notion of existential security, which was central to the 2023 parliamentary elections, refers most broadly to making ends meet and living without fear of what the future might bring. Its sudden rise as a demand (from the electorate) and a promise (from politicians) is fueled by increasing social and economic inequality, juridical insecurity in the face of bureaucratic overreach, housing shortages, and sundry threats from abroad: immigration, climate change, the breakdown of the postwar world order, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Boundary-crossing behavior, finally, is the concept at the heart of the Dutch #MeToo debate. Initially associated with sexual misconduct, the term now serves to describe a much wider range of inappropriate actions: superiors chewing out their subordinates, sexualized conversations in the workplace, unwanted expressions of affection, emotional manipulation, and subtle forms of bullying and stalking. In the past couple of years, prominent men and women of the political and cultural elite have been caught crossing boundaries in this way and made to pay the consequences. But in a country that has tended to associate transgression with progress—from the first female nude on public TV in the ’60s and (semi)legalized prostitution and drugs in the ’70s, to euthanasia and gay marriage in the aughts—the idea that transgression is now a bad thing feels profoundly confusing. In practice, moreover, it is often unclear where exactly the boundaries lie, until someone feels they have been crossed.
Yet Simon and Nicola do cross boundaries. And the discomfort and introspection this generates is key to each of the two novels.
Gerbrand Bakker, born in 1962, worked as a linguist, translator, and children’s book author until, in his mid-40s, he decided to become a licensed gardener. Around the same time, he published his first novel, Boven is het stil, a heart-wrenching story casually narrated by a lonely Dutch dairy farmer who lost his twin brother young and hates his dying father. The book became an immediate success and was translated into 30 languages; it appeared in English as The Twin (2009). The Hairdresser’s Son is his fifth novel. Marijke Schermer, meanwhile, was born in 1975, attended theater school, and has worked as a playwright and director. Her debut novel, Liefde, als dat het is (2019) came out in English as Love, If That’s What It Is (2022). Noodweer (2020) was published as Breakwater in 2023. In het oog is her third novel.
Bakker’s protagonist, a man in his 40s called Simon, runs the barber shop he has inherited from his grandfather in an old Jewish neighborhood of Amsterdam. Schermer’s Nicola is an accomplished microbiologist, also in her 40s, whose research deals with bacteria and viruses. Both are queer—Simon is gay, Nicola bisexual—and single. Both lost their fathers early. We drop into each of their lives in a moment of crisis.
Despite leading a tranquil, financially comfortable existence, Simon, on a whim, decides to investigate the death of his father, Cornelis. As far as he knows, his dad perished months before Simon’s birth in the deadliest plane crash ever recorded: the 1977 collision between two jets on a runway in the Canary Islands that killed 583 people, including 238 Dutch citizens. (By comparison, in the 2014 attack on flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, 196 Dutch perished.) Simon’s research leads him to question the way both his mother and the Dutch government handled the fallout of the crash. He can’t help feeling envious of the relatives of the passengers on board MH17, who received much more support, attention, and sympathy than the victims’ families did in 1977.
About a third into the novel, the plot takes on more weight as the third-person narrator unexpectedly jumps back 45 years to tell the story from Simon’s father’s perspective. We learn—but Simon doesn’t—that the circumstances of Cornelis’s trip to the Canary Islands were more complicated than Simon and his mother could have imagined.
When we meet Nicola, she, too, is at a crossroads. Her longtime partner, Bee (short for Beatrice), has just walked out on her. To justify the breakup, Bee complained that she didn’t feel needed, that Nicola seemed just fine on her own, and that she never shared how she felt. Bee is not wrong. Nicola, who narrates her own story, realizes that there is much she doesn’t understand about people, their emotional needs, or, for that matter, social conventions. Most of the time, she has no clue how to behave or how she comes across. Worse, Bee’s complaints resonate with those of her previous long-term partner, a man who left her 17 years earlier. He also felt excluded from Nicola’s inner world. She even has trouble emotionally connecting with her young adult daughter, who is a radical climate activist.
All this leaves Nicola stumped. Every time she is asked to share her emotions, she writes, she feels like “a blind mole in the dark, looking for something without knowing what it is.” It’s not only that her brain seems differently wired than that of her lovers; she’s also not particularly interested in penetrating their opaque inner worlds, whose emotional logic escapes her. In truth, she prefers the control, clarity, and quiet concentration of her lab work. “What made relationships so exhausting,” she reflects, “was the fact that you continuously had to think about what to do and say, about what the other person expects of you, and your attempts to meet those expectations; all the replies you need to be ready to give: about how you are feeling, how you are doing, what it is that you want.”
Both novels leave us with an open ending, on the edge of an impending catastrophe. In that way, both reflect the current mood in the Netherlands.
Schermer’s novel, like Bakker’s, is more plot-driven than is apparent at first. A major twist occurs a couple of chapters in, when Nicola, just weeks after her breakup, becomes fascinated with a man she sees eating alone at a restaurant. To her observing gaze, he seems both sweet and desperate. Without thinking twice, she stealthily follows him home. In the days following, she spies on him from a distance.
One day, when he leaves his apartment, Nicola breaks in and methodically goes through his stuff. The snooping makes her feel so close to Louis Kosta (she discovers his name in her stalking) that she begins visiting his place habitually. As the weeks go by, she takes more and more risk, only barely managing not to get caught. In her mind, she has a meaningful relationship with Louis. The fact that he doesn’t know about her, let alone their relationship, seems to her like a negligible detail.
Simon’s boundary-crossing behavior takes a different shape. Although, as a rule, his love life is limited to casual hookups, one day he finds himself attracted to a teenage boy with a nonverbal mental disability. Simon first meets Igor when helping out his mother, who volunteers as a swimming tutor for a group of school-aged disabled kids. After some weeks, Simon invites the boy home with him, planning to seduce him. As the novel progresses, we understand that his father Cornelis, too, made decisions—or rather, followed impulses—without considering their impact on those close to him.
There’s no denying that Simon’s and Nicola’s casual transgressions make the reader uncomfortable. Both seem aware that their behavior falls outside the norm, but that doesn’t seem to make much difference. “I want to have stated that I realized that it was strange I was becoming so mesmerized with Mr. Kosta,” Nicola assures her readers, as if she’s called to testify before a court. “But I thought it could all be relativized, precisely because I was so aware of the strangeness of my behavior.” Even as a lab researcher, it turns out, she feels entitled to break the rules. After her government funding is denied, she takes shortcuts to fabricate evidence of results that she is intuitively convinced of but cannot yet produce experimentally. Nicola’s superior intelligence, rather than providing her with moral guidance, leaves her ethical sense in the dust.
Nicola and Simon, both adrift, take us with them on their disturbing journeys. Nicola’s first-person narration allows her to share her rationalizations with her readers directly. “I felt strongly that I wasn’t just following a desire of my own, but was also meeting someone else’s needs,” she writes about her stalking: “I thought he couldn’t do without me.” Yet having access to Nicola’s thought process also makes it hard for us to judge her behavior without feeling we are betraying her. Later, she adds: “Because I sometimes cleaned up, or ate and drank something at his place, I imagined he had long figured out that someone had been visiting.” In Bakker’s novel, the third-person narrator allows us full access into Simon’s and Cornelis’s thoughts, yielding a similar effect. For all their social clumsiness, then, both Nicola and Simon are smart manipulators.
If Nicola and Simon are able to turn us into accomplices, it’s also because they appeal to our sympathy. For one, both have lost their fathers. While Simon was told his dad died before his birth, Nicola’s divorced father, clinically depressed, killed himself when she and her sister were in their early teens. In the same weeks that Nicola is putting together the puzzle pieces of her stalking victim’s life story, she also discovers, in her sister’s attic, a stack of unopened letters that her dad wrote to his two daughters. Their controlling mother, it turns out, had hid the letters from Nicola and her sister, although she stopped short of destroying them.
Nicola’s resistance to opening herself up to others, which prompted two breakups, also shapes her relationship with Louis. She believes she’s fully dedicated to saving and protecting him—but she also fantasizes with observing him as if he’s one of the bacteria colonies in her lab.
I am a researcher. I like to be focused. I like to look through my microscope. But in any relationship, there comes a point when you’re being asked to lie down under the looking glass. A point when they want me to show myself, or my feelings, or my relevance. Then suddenly it’s my responsibility to be visible as an object—instead of being an observer whose sole responsibility is to watch with care.
Is Nicola fit for this world? Will her unwillingness to be conventionally vulnerable, and her compulsion to express love by exerting control, be something Louis can accept?
The novel responds to this question, albeit only partially, with a final couple of plot twists. In the end, of course, Nicola’s desire to control her loved ones, and to observe without being observed, leads her to occupy the space of the novelist—the ultimate stalker. It’s not for nothing that Émile Zola likened fiction writing to a scientific experiment.
In Bakker’s novel, too, there are metafictional winks. “Not a single Dutch writer has ever written a word about that disaster,” one of Simon’s clients, a novelist who bears a close resemblance to Gerbrand Bakker, says about the Tenerife crash. In fact, he becomes so fascinated with the story of Simon and his father that he decides to write a novel about them. In the process, he hooks up with Simon. “How is it going with your book?” Simon asks him. “Fine,” the novelist replies. “Your father seems like a fictional character to me. And I think you’ll be satisfied when I’m finished.”
In a final taunt, both novels leave us with an open ending, on the edge of an impending catastrophe. In that way, both reflect the current mood in the Netherlands.
The fact that existential security, bestaanszekerheid, is something that the Dutch now demand—or that politicians believe they can promise—means two things: that they feel they have lost it, and that they feel they are entitled to it. This entitlement can be chalked up as a victory of the 20th-century European welfare state, which may have shaped Dutch collective consciousness more than any other country’s. At a deeper level, the sentiment is silly, of course: It’s one thing to call for social justice, but when have human beings ever been able to live without fear of the future?
The late Spanish novelist Javier Marías argued that only writing and reading fiction allows us to escape the unbearable open-endedness of reality. Writers who aspire to describe the world are bound to fail, he wrote, because they are always subject to correction. Fiction’s version of events, by contrast, is definitive. This, he added, is why fiction writers satisfy an important social need. “Once in a while we need to know something fully, to commit it to memory without the risk of rectification. … And the truth is that the only thing we can narrate like that, completely and with an unquestionable beginning and end, is that which has never happened.” Even for the Dutch, it will have to do. 
This article was commissioned by Bécquer Seguín.
