Right before I dove with earnest into Joseph O'Neill's NETHERLAND I happened to read a new item about the Booker shortlist, which dismissed this book (not on the short list) with the dread word, "overrated." I confess to using this word often in my non-writing life, but coming from an organization attempting to deliver news I wished they had provided some proof. While I had certainly read and heard about NETHERLAND before I picked it up, I hadn't read the New York Times/Kakutani review which I now know called the book "stunning" and "a resonant meditation on the American dream."
That review also compares NETHERLAND to a very popular "favorite book," THE GREAT GATSBY. And there is one very particular point of comparison between them, which is why I liked NETHERLAND but wasn't bowled over by it: Like Nick Carraway, Hans is drawn into someone else's existence as a way of filling the void left by his wife and son's return to England after 9/11. (A successful banker, he wasn't really aware his marriage had gone sour until she forces the question.) In this case, the Gatsby figure is Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidad-born entrepreneur Hans meets at a cricket match -- cricket being one of the other things he takes up in the aftermath.
At the beginning of the book we learn that Hans has returned to his wife and son in England, setting us up (or so it seemed) for a circular journey in which Hans lives in New York, weighs his life, and ultimately chooses in favor of fidelity and family. If New York City isn't to be made ugly in order to close this circle, a change must take place in our narrator -- a change we never see taking place. There are two scenes involving Chuck which Hans describes as being significant to him, but he is so willfully obtuse to us that the closest we get into this transformation is actually through his wife's words:
"It was not the case that I'd heroically bowled her over (my hope) or that she'd tragically decided to settle for a reliable man (my fear). She had stayed married to me, she stated in the presence of Juliet Schwarz, because she felt a responsibility to see me through life, and the responsibility felt like a happy one."Despite this, I did like NETHERLAND and given how many people I know have read it would consider it slightly underrated in my circle. The sensitive and nuanced picture that NETHERLAND tries to develop which, in another form, would be called a male midlife crisis never felt fully formed, but what we do see is developed in a very mature way, where Hans doesn't give himself much or any credit for making the decisions he does.
And the theme of alienation, the state of being a foreigner Hans feels literally in America and emotionally, is incredibly fine and never feels like a capital-T Theme. As he gets sucked into Chuck's dream, to build New York's first proper cricket stadium, the narrator finds himself having dreams about it "and everything is suddenly clear, and I am at last naturalized." In that respect, the knowledge that he doesn't assimilate -- that he leaves for London and, unknowingly, leaves Chuck to his fate (revealed in the opening as well) -- only adds to the narrative tension between himself and his country.
Earlier: I saw Joseph O'Neill read and Aimee Mann play.
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