The fact that Walter’s case against his wife seems flimsy — he has seen her at a New Year’s reception laughing at something the unprepossessing alderman is saying while he touches her elbow — is rather the point of Koch’s novel. Walter’s constant attempts to puff himself up (“I was on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. As the only mayor, and the only Dutch person too”) show this is clearly a deeply insecure man whose easy charisma masks a lack of moral backbone.

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Walter’s constant carping at the state of his city, ranging from its deplorable garbage collection to the ugliness of its “city hall-cum-opera,” the Stopera, only serves to underline the lack of progress he has made as mayor. It’s surely no coincidence that the alderman Walter suspects of having an affair with his wife is profoundly green and wants to install wind turbines around the capital’s perimeter. “If everyone in Holland would turn down the heat by one degree Celsius in the winter,” Walter grumbles, “we could save the energy produced by 10,000 wind-turbines.”

But here’s the rub: On this occasion Walter may well have a point. It’s the sort of thing that makes Koch such an intriguing writer; his provocations are designed to reveal nothing so much as our own feelings of entitlement. “The Dinner,” which was his sixth novel and the first to be translated into English, struck a chord because it showed the lengths parents will go to in order to protect their children, however reprehensible their crimes. His next, “Summer House With Swimming Pool,” demonstrated how a good parent under pressure can become a bad one; while his previous novel, “Dear Mr. M,” grappled with how tolerance of others — particularly immigrants — can be overtaken by a sense of superiority. Stephen King is a notable fan, tweeting after “Dear Mr. M” was published that those “three novels, taken together, are like a killer EP where every track kicks ass.”

In “The Ditch,” which has been seamlessly rendered into English by his regular translator, Sam Garrett, Koch again seeks to show the fault lines beneath the surface of ostensibly civilized society. Eventually it’s Sylvia’s turn to be taken aback when she learns that her husband’s nonagenarian parents, in spite of their relatively good health, have decided to kill themselves in a joint suicide pact. “Why can’t you let life go the way it goes?” she demands of her acquiescent husband. “Why does everything have to be arranged, from cradle to grave? I don’t get it, I really don’t, you people have lost all touch with reality.”

Suddenly the “you people” is being used by someone who has become accustomed to its aspersion. Yet now she has reached her own end point of alienation. It’s a worrying glimpse of cultural incompatibility that the 65-year-old author confronts us with. But it’s also one that he shies away from by tagging on an unearned ending that feels awfully hollow, mainly because Sylvia and the couple’s teenage daughter, Diana, never emerge as fully fledged characters.