New novel by Juli Zeh: The evidence is thin

Whenever Juli Zeh publishes a novel, it is always guaranteed a place on the bestseller list, and that will be the case this time too. In addition to the author's omnipresence in the media, this is mainly due to the fact that her readers can indulge in the idea of ​​having a real mirror held up to them while reading. The whole thing is always beautifully presented in easy-to-read, unwieldy sentences and quickly becomes the “book of the season”, perhaps even the “book of the hour”.

Probably the most interesting aspect of Zeh's new novel, "Pony Show", is that parts of the plot itself deal with the book market, the publishing industry and the audience's expectations of literature, which will also make "Pony Show" a sales success again.

Betty, the main character of the book, is the head of a successful Hamburg publishing house, in this role initially unchallenged and strong of opinion: “Betty doesn't like novels in which writers write about writers,” says the second main character, her lawyer Mark, about her aversion to autofictional material. She then misplaces them anyway. Betty thinks that your publishing program should be surprising in some places, but reliable overall. The readership is in a “post-truth confusion”.

Juli Zeh: “Pony Show”. Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Munich 2026. 512 pages, 25 euros

Fortunately, society has produced institutions to combat the post-truth confusion, including the media, which at best is at least committed to truthfulness. Or the criminal justice system, whose job it is to find a sanction for what hopefully turns out to be true in the course of a trial. With “Pony Show” Zeh puts a question mark on the fact that the media and the judiciary are doing their job particularly well in this regard.

Because Betty is charged before the Hamburg regional court – for murder. The public prosecutor, who appears more American in his zeal for prosecution, accuses her of killing her much younger publishing assistant Fero. It's a murder without a body. Fero is gone, but no one knows whether he's dead. The evidence is thin.

Fero had come into Betty's life a few months earlier as a young assistant editor. He was talented, cheeky, good looking. He had “a hazy intelligence in his eyes that seems to arise from the deep layers of consciousness.” What reads as pathetic and sounds a bit like an incurable eye disease was well received by Betty: she involved him in her role as boss, edited a manuscript with him, invited him to dinner and also developed a certain obsession. Until the whole thing turned tragic.

The novel tells the tough course of the court case from the perspective of Betty's lawyer Mark, and gets a bit tough at times. This is also because you cannot escape Mark's narrative perspective. Right from the start, the lawyer and client make sure that they belong to the middle to upper Hanseatic middle class by finding out that they order their wine from the same Palatinate winemaker, name-dropping included. Mark sees himself as a happy man: "House, carport, children. Summer vacation on Lanzarote. Skiing in Switzerland in the winter. Everyone wants that. Because it's the most you can get in this world. Nothing more is possible. What's wrong with that?" A lot of what Mark says is very annoying and you have to put up with him for 500 pages willy-nilly.

What is rather unfortunate for Mark himself is, firstly, that he finds his client attractive, and secondly, that she is very hesitant to tell him why she is actually in court. The fact that a defendant does not tell her lawyer enough over hundreds of pages to be able to be defended by him in a meaningful way can actually only be explained with the formal argument that such a legal thriller needs a certain length and one or two plot twists in order to have the necessary entertainment value. There are no real reasons for Betty's salami tactics beyond a somewhat contrived long-term loyalty to Betty Fero.

Meanwhile, Betty is certain that a proxy fight is actually being fought here, and she announces in a newspaper interview with one of the many schematic, unscrupulously exaggerated press representatives who appear in the novel: The trial is nothing other than a fight against the female gender. Especially if, as in her case, the woman loves a much younger man, contrary to social norms.

This patriarchal dimension of the court proceedings in turn gives rise to feminist and left-wing activists who demonstrate in front of the court, but whose wisdom Zeh considers to be rather low. Which is a shame, as she could have taken a closer look here. In the last third of the novel, the writer interweaves another ongoing debate, the manipulation of the public through social media, with the progress of the court case, but is unable to add anything really new to what has already been said and written on the topic elsewhere.

The same applies to the skepticism that always shines through towards an all too absolute concept of truth: "Truth is an aesthetic category. The most beautiful story wins," says Zeh about her protagonist Betty. This doesn't make you any smarter; and so many of Zeh's zeitgeist themes are merely mentioned without any major insight being gained; even the war in Ukraine makes a small appearance. After all, there are interesting things for non-lawyers to learn about the German justice system, for example that it is chronically underfunded, that lay judges are more important than you might think, and that judicial sergeants are really nice people.

Ultimately, in “Pony Show” Zeh writes about success, power, love between a man and a woman and the possibility of finding your own happiness with someone other than yourself. In this respect, it is an ordinary novel, whose ordinariness is matched by the fact that lawyer Mark, despite his nervousness, his alcoholism, his unprofessionalism and aggressiveness, is doubtfully allowed to become a hero in the end.