Netherland: A Novel
by Joseph O'Neill
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Book Reviews of Netherland: A Novel
Book Review: Gorgeous words, sober phrases, unfulfilled centre
Summary: 3 Stars
Every year brings out a '9-11' novel, usually by white people. Well, the pattern certainly has established its own genre requirements . . . an elegy for New York's global invulnerability, a meditation on American power dynamics, and the 'Babel' like intricacies of people, connections, debts, and destinations.
_Netherland_ is definitely one of the best of the lot . . . much less self-conscious, in some respects, than previous offerings. The prose style is undoubtedly majestic, if borrowing more than a few cues from Fitzgerald in terms of vocabulary (and also means of death). Unquestionably, the incessant quest for the curious metaphor drives much of the writing style. WIthout exception, it's successful. Ornate observations, and twisty clauses of comparison and elegy for another New York, somewhere else, no longer anyone's to own. In particular, the 'Google Earth' sequence, in which the extremely symbolic cricket pitch is revisited virtually stands out as some extremely fine writing.
But let's put aside the brilliance of the writing for a moment, as hard as that is to do. What is being said; here? For the most part, the work is yet another extended meditation on the mythic redemption of 'New York': the metropolis as real, symbol, and imaginary. The psychoanalysis of extreme urbanity doesn't really reach any philosophical heights, just a languishing capitulation . . . like all the 9-11 novels, these are wealthy literary people . . . the very kind whose lungs weren't scarred that day . . . who stand idly buy in metonymic reproach for policies that they quietly endorse by their very lifestyles. Housing prices up in the Hamptons? Sobbing sirens as the American Express building shakes? I suspect this book, for all its beauty, will twenty years from now feel very dated and confined by the zeitgeist parameters of its time.
Where is O'Neill going with all this? I loved the way he led me by word and phrase, but the soul of the matter remains elusive. What he have instead if cricket, the under-appreciated sport that provides a technical gimmick (and quirky vocabulary) for injecting some culture into a rather prosaic tale of chasing love and clocks that won't turn back. Maybe you have to live in New York to feel part of O'Neil's ritualization of the landscape, but for me the work remained overly creedal in tone and perspective. Definitely not a Great Gatsby, despite the effort involved here.
Still, an exceptionally well-written book, the ends in a slush pile. Unlike Gatsby, faced down drowned in the froth of a payback death, we get the bloated corpse first. Rather than the grandeur of a West Egg swimming pool, our anti-hero snorts drainage water . . . the antithesis to Fitzgerald's vision is obvious.
Book Review: The Limit is Cricket
Summary: 5 Stars
1t's 2006 and six-foot-five equity analyst Hans van den Broek and his barrister wife Rachel are back together in London with their son Jake after a separation, when Hans gets a phone call from the New York Times. The reporter on the other end of the phone tells him Khamraj Ramikisson has been found dead in the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. He'd been murdered. He had been handcuffed, his body had been rotting in filth and stink for two years.
From there Hans goes on to remember his life in New York following the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. He and his family had been forced to move from their home to the famous Chelsea Hotel, but only a month later Rachel takes Jake back to London, she's unhappy with both the American government and her husband.
Hans stays behind, living life and observing people in the Chelsea in sort of a stupor, then one day he sees a cricket bat in a taxi and is taken back to the sport of his youth in Holland. He joins a Staten Island team.
One day an angry bowler starts throwing at Hans' head and the umpire tosses the bowler out of the game, then stands up to a fan with a gun who disagrees with his decision. The ump is a Trinidadian, two decades older than Hans named Khamraj Ramikisson, who goes by the name of Chuck.
Chuck is a hustler, a schemer, a man perpetually seeking that greener grass. He has big plans and one of his biggest is a cricket stadium in Floyd Bennett Field, an abandoned airport in Brooklyn. He wants to make cricket a huge game in America and he wants to get rich in the process. Chuck's motto is, "Think Fantastic" and that just about sums up the man.
Hans becomes infected and with Chuck, infatuated with the eternally optimistic man who believes, despite Nine-Eleven and it's aftermath, despite it all, that America is still a land of opportunity and endless possibilities. However, sadly for Chuck, he doesn't quite get it that there are those in the country he loves who won't understand or appreciate his dreams, who won't share his optimism, those who think like one potential investor tells him about his grand scheme, that, "there's a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket".
We know right from the start how it all ends up for Chuck Ramikisson, but we read on anyway, because the writing is so fluid, the characters so real and I can certainly attest to how real as life Chuck Ramikisson is. I spent half a decade living in Trinidad and loving every minute of it and while there I met more than a few folks like him, wonderful people all and this is a wonderful book, a story superbly told about people you won't soon forget.
Reviewed by Vesta Irene
Book Review: It still escapes us...
Summary: 3 Stars
If you are, like the rest of us, still searching for that post-9/11 epic that perfectly evokes the Zeitgeist of our present time, you will certainly be, as I was, disappointed with Mr. O'Neill's novel "Netherland." What the New York Times Book Review lauded as "Post 9/11, a New York of Gatsby-Size Dreams and Loss" is certainly a misleading epithet if not a downright lie. Indeed, comparing Mr. O'Neill's book to F. Scott Fitzgerald's chef-d'oeuvre is committing a terrible travesty. As critic Dwight Garner writes: "Joseph O'Neill's `Netherland' is not [the definitive 9/11] novel. It's too urbane, too small-boned, too savvy to carry much Dreiserian sweep and swagger." The novel's most apparent shortcoming is the static nature of its characters. Even the enigmatic, quote-unquote "Gatsby-like" character in the book--Chuck Ramkissoon--comes across as insipid, one-dimensional, and horribly banal. His cliché motto, "Think fantastic," is a far cry from Fitzgerald's complex and multi-layered characterization of Jay Gatsby. Although non-linear plots are a common phenomenon in modern literature, the plot of O'Neill's book is desultory, capricious, and irritatingly coreless. Whereas the disjointed plot of "The Great Gatsby" comes across as remarkably fluid owing to Fitzgerald's masterful style (a combination of short, concise descriptions, compelling dialogue, and lyrical passages), "Netherland" lacks cohesion as a result of underdeveloped characters, prosaic dialogue, and a writing style that vacillates between average and very good. The best (and worst) feature of "Netherland" is, of course, the many historical allusions that Mr. O'Neill makes to events of modern times: 9/11, the Israeli-Hezbollah War, the Great Blackout of 2003, the Iraq War, the failures of the Bush Administration, etc. "Netherland"'s most distinctive trait is, by far, the inclusion of these contemporary events into the narrative of Hans van den Broek. However, like many aspects of the book, these allusions seem too superficial and deliberate. For someone who professes multiple times throughout the story that he is not politically conscious, Hans seems uncannily aware of the politics of the post-9/11 era. It seems to me as though Mr. O'Neill constructed the "spirit of the times" around the story and not vice versa. That is to say he wrote the book from top-down instead of from the bottom up. This is ultimately why "Netherland," although an interesting attempt at evoking the post-9/11 Zeitgeist, fails to compel or captivate the reader.Book Review: So we beat on, readers against the current.
Summary: 5 Stars
My thoughts on Netherland relate to the final page of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which seems to be the precedent of O'Neils novel.
(loose qoutation)
'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past... Until gradually I bacame aware of the old island that flowered for Dutch Sailors' eyes.'
What 'Netherland' boils down to for American readers (New Yorkers in particular), is how willing are we to receive our cultural history from foreign perspectives. For all of those whom made statements post 9/11 like: 'it's our chickens coming home to roost...on', I think we finally can say itabout our literary experience.
In the 20th century, the American Literary greats like Mark Twain, Henry James, Hemmingway, the list goes on... found success in focusing on foreign territoeies. The ugly, or not so ugly American raging through continental Europe served as a means for codifying a comparately vague national identity, defining ourselves as readers and writers from experiences while abroad.
And isn't it literary justice that one of the most overtly 9/11 novels to date levels at New Yorkers through foreign eyes. Year by year, our self-image as the dominant economic, political and artistic voice recedes before us, and never has the idea felt so prescient as when I read 'Netherland'.
While I was willing to concede that 'Netherland' was evocative in how it referenced America from the 'Netherland', its characters grounded in the outerboroughs of NYC- looking distantly at disaster stricken Manhattan Island, the novel was equally dissapointing in how superficially it rendering the landscape.
But what could I possibly have expected? If I once thought Hemmingway an expert on Bull Riding in Spain and Big Game hunting in Africa, maybe the unsatisfied feeling that I had while reading about my hometown during the time that I came of age is a wakeup call... a reason to become more humble, to understand that having an American Passport does not make myself an expert of the world, equally an American Visa is still not yet American as Apple Pie.
I believe and hope that literature continues to be an avenue for deep cultural exchange, and I think foreign writers will continue to sharpen O'Neils "Netherland"... It is a view we should all be willing to consider.
Book Review: Enormously Disappointing
Summary: 1 Stars
That I am even writing this is evidence of my dislike. I have a million things to do, and yet, out of sheer disgust and disappointment, I must critique this work. That this earned the reviews it did, has made me more intrepid about reviving my own writing career. If this author, whose name I will never remember, since the work itself is immemorable, can write and get the reviews he did, so can I. So can You. So can my dog.
If there were beautiful sentences, I missed them! You want beautiful sentences, read Fitzgerald, to whom this author, shockingly, erroneously, has been compared. Read Roth's Everyman, Llosa's The Bad Girl, Petterson's Out Stealing Horses. You want a substitute for Ambien, read this novel.
My problem with this book is that I didn't care about the characters. Had I not recommended it for my book group, I wouldn't have finished it. (Having finished it, I can say I wouldn't have missed much!) Around page 175 I felt a twinge for the protagonist, Hans, the stirrings of feeling, but this didn't evolve into anything more significant. The female character was flat and unbelievable, which made Han's affection for her unbelievable. The Chuck character was uneven. He was like a sketch of a character. I felt as though the author didn't really know him. When, finally, something happens to him I thought, who cares? (Who's Chuck?)
The narrator spends a lot of time telling about the events in his life. but he is a royal bore, thus, so were his exegeses. I would launch into one of these paragraphs, and, midway through, substitute blah, blah, blah.
In my opinion, the author undertook a literary task that proved out of his league. He developed a depressed and disassociated first person narrator undergoing life altering experiences. Unlike say, Salinger or Roth or Petteron or Charles Baxter, he failed to make this narrator evoke feelings in the reader. There was a lot of telling in this book. I often had the impression the author himself wasn't intimate with his characters. I never got there.
Based on the reviews I read everywhere I recommended this dull mass of words to my book group and I am embarrassed. I plan to fill the time talking about all the other good books I recently read.