De goede zoon

There were a number of aspects of this novel that I found quite irritating. To begin with, the writing style. Some of the sentences are very long, more than a page long on page 81 for instance. A writer like Dickens is able to pull that off, but van Essen seems to sometimes just substitute commas for full stops and ramble on for ages. Those woolly sentences are sometimes interspersed with equally extremely short sentences, sometimes just fragments without a verb. I suppose that he is aiming for a particular effect, but I'm afraid I found it just irritating. Some of the long dialogues are just plain boring.
Another thing that was irritating was that he decided not to use quotation marks when someone is talking. The result is that in longer dialogues it isn't always clear who is talking, and even less clear if someone is talking or just thinking something.
A third aspect of the style which I struggled with was that the protagonist has no name. That is more often, but there were several occasions when the author tied himself into unnatural knots to keep to that, "... hij sluit af met mijn naam' ["...he finished by saying my name"]. And finally, that we have no ideas about where the journey goes is also doubtless on purpose (the 'plotless thriller'), but that was also wasted on me.
I am a big fan of science fiction, so was looking forward to that aspect. That was a little disappointing, for example, most of the technology was either a bit silly (the crawling rucksacks - or was that a nod to Terry Pratchett's Luggage?) or is already in prototype today. The car being able to measure emotions by means of physiological measurements was an interesting one because I have actually helped write several research proposals on precisely that topic in the last years. I must say though, the sex scene with the car was the most ridiculous sex scene I've ever read. Was it there for a sort of joke or because it seems to be compulsory to have a sex scene in Dutch literature? It didn't work for me. And as our heterosexual male protagonist has sex with the car, it makes the car female? But then directly afterwards, the car is chasing females around like it is a male? That doesn't seem very well thought out, unless it is deliberately some sort of gender fluidity there.
There are two aspects where the book does succeed a little better, in my opinion. The unreliability and lack of permanence of memory is explored from various perspectives. That does raise some interesting issues, although van Essen does seem to think that memory is a sort of recording that can be corrupted; it is in fact a construction.
Secondly, the relationship of the child (and then man) to his mother (and indirectly to the rest of his family) is explored. That is done in an interesting way, though that also is sometimes a little long-winded.