Reading Note: Re-reading Netherland
Over the weekend, I re-read Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. One of the great books of the year (at the very least), Netherland was too big and beautiful a fish to catch with only one reading, and for months I despaired of finding the time to sit down quietly and read it again. Then I remembered: St Croix at Thanksgiving! And in the event the confluence of heavenly weather and even more heavenly prose has been a pleasure the likes of which I haven’t had since I re-read Emma, for the sixth time, in Maine, in 1996.
What follows is a sketch of the opening paragraphs of the Portico page to come. If you haven’t read Netherland already, don’t wait to run out and get a copy!
Joseph O’Neill, who burst upon the greater literary scene last spring, is among the most suave writers of prose working today, and his novel, Netherland, would be a very easy read if it were not also a very beautiful one. The book is studded with what, on a recent-re-reading, struck me as beauty marks, spots of intensely brilliant writing that, while never gratuitous, are surely luxuriant, and might well have been blue-penciled had they not been too lovely to lose. (Mozart’s mature music is full of such small marvels.) Neither these nor any other passages, however, stand in the way of the attentive reader’s comprehension. There are no palpable mysteries to probe, no craggy, runic utterances to crack. Netherland always makes sense. And why should it not? To put it the other way round: Why does its very intelligibility feel so strange?
Feeling that there might be more than met the eye, I was reluctant to write about Netherland upon a first reading. In part, I was muddled by the reviews, which, whether they were favorable or not, seemed uniformly superficial (the one exception was James Woods’s). There was a lot of talk about The Great Gatsby, at first claiming that Netherland was its worthy successor, and then laughing such claims to scorn. There was a great deal of interest in Chuck Ramkissoon, the novel’s most colorful figure, and a great deal of complaining about cricket, which is indeed a game that Americans may never understand.
“The New York Cricket Club,” Faruk says, raising his eyebrows, “was a splendid eidea — a gymkhana in New York. We had a chance there. But would the big project have worked? No. There’s a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket.”
The reviewers were conversely indifferent to the narrator, Hans van den Broek, and his apparently hapless marital problems. Some critics did not like his wife, Rachel, while others found the novel’s account of Hans’s Wall Street career thin and unconvincing. All of this seemed to me to be beside the case. But I couldn’t say what the case was, myself. This was obviously the larger problem. In the most vulgar terms, I didn’t feel that I knew what Netherland is about. I knew that I would have to re-read the novel for a better look.
It isn’t, as I say, a case of solving riddles. I don’t suspect that another story altogether lies beneath the one that Hans van den Broek narrates. Take Jane Smiley’s masterpiece, A Thousand Acres. Anyone who didn’t fall asleep through all of high school will quickly recognize, in Ms Smiley’s tale of an Iowa farmer and his three daughters, a retelling of King Lear. (At the same time, no one with a grain of literary sensibility will conclude that the retelling of of Lear is what A Thousand Acres is about). It may be that Mr O’Neill has patterned Netherland on a literary work that I’ve never heard of; it would not be difficult to find something new to teach me. If so, however, I must announce my ignorance at the outset and make the best of the novel on its own. (That Netherland is not a retelling of Gatsby has never, to my mind, been in doubt; any sensed references to Fitzgerald’s novella work, on the contrary, to point out what is unlike.)
Rather, it is a matter of looking at the author’s ways and means. How does he tell his story? Not straightforwardly, to be sure! Here is the first remarkable thing to note: this novel, so readily grasped, has a convoluted command of narrative time that I hesitate to call “baroque” only because the term is no longer complimentary. As the novel progresses, the ever-busier shuttling of time-frames weaves a full-dimensioned corporeality capacious enough for the reader to enter. This space reverberates not with familiar memories but with the familiarity of memory. This is how we remember one thing within another, interrupting ourselves to intensify a point, or eliding over embarrassments before they can queer the angle of reminiscence. This is what it is like to recollect.
And so I set out not so much to re-read the novel as to regard it, to unfurl its gorgeous but closely folded fabric. I knew the parts; I wanted to know the pattern. Struggling against the novel’s powerful temptation to float along the stream of its enchanted language, I came to feel that I was chasing a fantastically sinuous dragon, restlessly immobile in an imaginative firmament that I had never glimpsed before. And when I would put the book down, I was reminded of what one might say of the delight of getting to know a lover’s body. The pleasures of this text are immense.