Hermans is known for bleak, philosophical novels, so it's a little unexpected to find yourself here in what looks like a satirical campus farce, in a late-seventies register somewhere between The history man and Abigail's party. But with a hint of Stoner too! Clemens is a sociology lecturer in Groningen, middle-aged and despairing of ever making it to full professor, rapidly losing his faith in the professional advantages of sticking to Marx and Marcuse. His wife, Sita, knows that the other faculty-wives look down on her: they are all students who married their professors; she was serving in a snack-bar when she met Clemens. She has hopes of publishing a successful children's book, like her neighbour Alies, but things seem to keep going wrong with the project, roughly in proportion to the rate at which the level of sherry goes down in the "vinegar" bottle in the kitchen. Meanwhile, her beautiful daughter, Parel, also seems to be heading full-tilt down some kind of slippery slope.

There's a lot of play with academic one-upmanship, and with the L-shaped living-rooms and sofas of suburban life (and the green letterboxes that keep getting pinched from suburban front gardens), and there are plenty of the kind of painfully embarrassing coincidences that belong to that kind of farce. But it gradually becomes obvious that there's also something darker going on. Sita's little book, "Beertje Bombazijn" (which Hermans wrote and actually published, under Sita's name) has its surreal side: one of the bears plays the tambourine and keeps a gypsy on a chain to collect the money for him. And actual bears, dream-bears and teddy-bears keep popping up in the novel in bizarre ways. There are suggestions of medieval allegory in many of the character names, and a strong hint — in a gratuitous walk-on appearance by the Professor of Middle English — that we should be looking for parallels with the poem "The Pearl".

Funny, in a warped way, and with some very acute bits of social observation. But maybe a bit more heavily-layered with meaning than it absolutely needs to be. ( )