Author: Joseph O’Neill
Pantheon, 2008
Best ebook deal: Public library
| C4 Ratings.....out of | 10 |
|---|---|
| Language..... | 7 |
| Entertainment..... | 6 |
| Depth..... | 8 |
Netherland, which won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner award for fiction and lost this week in the first round of the Tournament of Books, is a novel of ideas more than people. It’s a novel that sits and thinks about life, and if you’re looking for one of those, it’s a pretty decent one. But it is not a novel of plot, or of action, or of particular or sustained entertainment.
The main character, Hans van der Broek, is a Dutch banker, living in New York after his wife has taken his son and moved back to England. He spends a lot of his time puzzling out exactly how everything in his life has gone so wrong: how his marriage went wrong; how his friendships went wrong; how he himself went wrong; and how America went wrong, both politically, specifically in the invasion of Iraq, and socially, specifically in the fact that a major, supposedly democratic city like New York so mistreats its foreign citizens that, for example, it allows its hundreds of thousands of immigrant cricket enthusiasts to have precisely zero proper cricket fields.
Not surprisingly, given all this, Hans has long been in the chasm of a deep malaise. He frequently describes it as tiredness:
I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was the tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. … A banal state of affairs, yes—but our problems were banal, the stuff of women’s magazines.
It’s understandable subject matter: this kind of semi-depressed bafflement mixed with lethargy seems to be a common element of modern life, and a common element of modern writing. The thing is, literature that deals with such feelings must face the problem of how to stare into the abyss—“the big dark,” as one of my professors once called it—and still maintain the momentum needed for a riveting narrative. The kind of character that addresses the big dark also tends to have a few literarily undesirable qualities—passivity most notably. Hans is no exception: he’s passive to a drudging fault, and despite his exhaustive catalogings of everything that’s gone wrong, he almost never takes the slightest action to do anything about it.
O’Neill’s writing reflects this passivity; his prose is sharp and precise and complex, but not particularly fun. It’s the style of a master Englishist not bothering to pretty up his sentences. At first, I thought this was simply O’Neill’s way, a product perhaps of his background in law. But O’Neill allows other characters such as Chuck Ramkissoon, Hans’s foil (or the object of Hans as foil), to indulge in episodes of delight. For instance, Chuck explains the difficulties involved with his kosher sushi business:
“…seahorses are not kosher. Neither are shrimps and eels and octopus and squid. Only fish with scales and fins are kosher. But not all fish with fins have scales,” Chuck added. “And sometimes what you think are scales are in fact bony protrusions. Bony protrusions do not qualify as scales. No, sir.”
There are a number of other minor characters who steal scenes from Hans at every turn, but Chuck is the most present, and the most noticeable. Chuck lives an exciting, dangerous life. He hatches schemes, and he has bold, daring plans to do something about the wrongs of the world; specifically, he’s building a proper cricket field. He fights and strives and loves and cares and, above all, acts.
In reading Netherland, I soon enough figured out that, as much as I might have wanted it, this novel is not about Chuck Ramkissoon. It is about Hans, and even as I pitied him his sadness, I couldn’t help feeling abandoned whenever Chuck exited, and I was left alone with Hans and his incessant, obsessive cogitation.
Not that Hans is a particularly bad or ineloquent cogitator. In fact, he can often be insightful, such as his diagnosis for early-21st century America:
We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington, and, for that matter, Moscow.
That’s an elegant, entertaining, eloquent insight. Unfortunately, while Hans is an interesting, thoughtful guy, he simply does want or need or act in the way Chuck does—even when he does accidentally involve himself in drama, it’s Chuck who maintains it, and pushes him on against his instincts to give up and do nothing. Hans himself acknowledges this difference between them, and even identifies it as one of the problems of his existence. Unfortunately, that self-awareness doesn’t make much difference to the reader who must still follow Hans.
The weight of the novel, the weight of our attention, must rest ultimately on Hans’s thoughts, his musings, and his memories. While they are often good, they are just as often dreary or inconsequential, and they rarely reach true excellence.
The same can be said of the novel itself.
Similar books: Falling Man, by Don DeLillo; Kissing in Manhattan (stories) by David Schickler; The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
Similar winners of the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction: Billy Bathgate, by E.L. Doctorow; Independence Day, by Richard Ford (sequel to The Sportswriter; also check out the third in the trilogy, The Lay of the Land)
