I’ve Been Reading: Netherland
Shortly after 9/11, Hans van den Broek’s wife leaves him alone in New York City – in the Chelsea Hotel, no less – and returns to England with their young son. For the next two years, Hans commutes to London every other weekend, and spends the rest of his time aimlessly distracting himself in post-disaster New York. He becomes involved with a cricket league composed of various immigrants and enjoys thinking back to his youthful days of playing cricket in The Hague, where he was born. One player is Chuck Ramkissoon, a charismatic and eccentric Trinidadian mover-and-shaker, who has his fingers in all sorts of pies. Hans finds himself more and more involved with Chuck, drawn into his mysterious world.
Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland is largely about cricket, which is something I can’t get a mental picture of at all. Hans himself admits that:
The uninitiated onlooker at a cricket game is . . . puzzled by the alternation of two batsmen and two bowlers and two sets of stumps. . . . It can take a while before the puzzle is sufficiently solved, particularly for the American viewer. I can’t count the number of times I, in New York, fruitlessly tried to explain to a baffled passerby the basics of the game taking place in front of him, a failure of explanation and comprehension that soon irritated me and led me to give up.
As elusive as the cricket descriptions, however, the various illustrations of New York City neighborhoods, landmarks and institutions are lovely, from the Herald’s Square DMV to the Greenwood Cemetery. O’Neill has a knack for setting, and his brief descriptions cut right to the essence of a place. And in Netherland, O’Neill is expansive on the subject of New York. Critics have compared this book to Gatsby, and indeed the mapping is unavoidable: Chuck Ramkissoon is found floating in the Gowanus Canal at the beginning of the novel, and the comparisons only start there. The book spends time on the American dream, the idea that any hard-working dreamer can go rags-to-riches, and Chuck is the ultimate schemer. When Rachel asks Hans about Chuck’s politics, Hans realizes he has no idea:
The decisive item, if I’m going to be honest about this, was that Chuck was making a go of things. The sushi, the mistress, the marriage, the real estate dealings, and, almost inconceivably, Bald Eagle Field: it was all happening in front of my eyes. While the country floundered in Iraq, Chuck was running. That was political enough for me, a man having trouble putting one foot in front of the other.
And yet, for all its Gatsbyish notes, Netherland is not really about America, precisely because it is such a love song to New York City, and any American who spends upwards of a minute in NYC knows that it’s not remotely representative of the 50 states proper (not that any one location really is). But then, in another sense, the quintessential American dream is realistically centered in NYC, because so many immigrants arrive here, join communities of immigrants from their own countries, and live and work here for generations. I’ve met people who’ve lived here for years and have never been anywhere else in the country. This city is more of an international crossroads than a fixed location; it is the most international place I have ever been, which is one big reason why I love it.* In this respect (the gathering of the teeming masses), New York is the ultimate representation of an American ideal – albeit America as it never really was, and most emphatically is not now. But somewhere back there, in between the Puritans and the ’50s, there was a time when New York was thought to be representative of the country itself. Later, after relocating to London, Hans observes:
Although it’s not a secret that I lived for some time in [New York], I’m not accorded any unusual atuhority. This isn’t because I’ve been back for awhile but, rather, because I’m precluded by nationality from commenting on any place other than Holland – one of those parochialisms, I am pissed off to rediscover, that remind me that as a foreign person I’m essentially of some mildly buffoonish interest to the English and deprived, certainly, of the nativity New York encourages even its most fleeting visitor to imagine for himself. And it’s true: my secret, almost shameful feeling is that I am out of New York – that New York interposed itself, once nad for all, between me and all other places of origin.
But commenting on the American dream is not the main thrust of Netherland – this is primarily a book about Hans, and Hans is intrigued by Chuck, but in a removed, and not overly involved way. Whereas Carraway’s raison d’etre as narrator was to observe and describe Gatsby, Hans’s relationship with Chuck is a take-it-or-leave-it sort of friendship, as is everything in Hans’s life at that time. In fact, the motivations of all of the characters in Netherland are fuzzy at best. We don’t really know why Rachel leaves Hans – mostly because Hans, a rather unreliable narrator, will not admit to having any idea himself. We don’t really know why Hans stays obediently behind in New York for as long as he does (again, he doesn’t spend much mental time on it himself), or why everyone in the novel seems to suffer from a confusing and painful ennui (“I wasn’t especially troubled by the hours spent flat on my face,” says Hans, of his habit of lying for hours with his head under the armchair in his hotel room). Perhaps it has something to do with 9/11 itself, which, while mercifully not focused on in much outrageous detail, bookends the story of these people, looms slightly behind them without their ever looking straight at it, just as the actual event framed New York itself and everything that happened here for some time. Hans: “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.” But Hans’s mourning has far less to do with 9/11, and more with the fracturing of his family, and his lack of ability to shake off his own inertia:
The difficulty was not merely that I couldn’t think of an alternative to the program of traveling to London once or twice a month. No, my difficulty was that I could not disarrange the boundless, freezing dismay that undermined every personal motion I attempted. It was as if, in my inability to produce a movement in my life, I had fallen victim to the paralysis that confounds actors in dreams as they vainly try to run or talk or make love.
Perhaps Netherland is more about the time it takes to shake off a tragedy – something unreasonable and inexplicable happens, and people totter away from its epicenter, where, stunned and confused, they distractedly go on with their lives.
At any rate, I didn’t care. Nobody could call this a bad book – it won the PEN/Faulkner, after all – and I paged through it readily enough, but it left no deep impression on me, and I wouldn’t ever urge it on someone.
