Netherland

Joseph O'Neill's Netherland does something remarkable and peculiar -- it gives us an up-to-date version of the archetypal American novel without any archetypal Americans.

At least not any archetypal Americans of the kind that the literature of the 20th century has made recognizable to us as such. The Americans here are all recent transplants, some of them temporary, from England or Trinidad or places unidentified, and in this regard Netherland signals the literary equivalent of the great call to make-way that seems to be booming everywhere around us -- that these transplants are rapidly becoming the new archetype. In the narrator, however, a Dutchman-by-way-of-London named Hans, we see that this new archetype is in fact merely a remixed version of the old one; Hans' unlikely Trinidadian friend, Chuck Ramkissoon, reminds the transplanted Dutchman at one point that he is "a member of the first tribe of New York, excepting of course the Red Indians."

Hans' background brilliantly serves to justify the somewhat un-contemporary sound of the novel's prose, which is generally too formal to capture the rhythm of things today, but which would not have been out of place a hundred years ago -- and which is believable, coming from a financial analyst who learns English as a second language in England. And the truth is that the sound of this prose is Netherland's most immediately engaging quality. Reviews comparing Netherland to The Great Gatsby abound, and not without good cause. We are reminded of Nick Carraway almost instantly -- the trustworthy narrator, one who, we are certain, is telling us the truth because he does not go out of his way to make himself look good to the reader. Fluid, graceful, and finely-crafted -- we thought that these qualities no longer had a home in the contemporary novel. How gratifying it is to see these attributes in action on the page -- even if we suspect that no one, not even O'Neill, will ever be able to pull it off again. Consider Hans' knowing observations when he and Chuck navigate their way through the city:

We made our way through animated hordes of men. At a certain point, Chuck grabbed my arm and said, "Let's cross now," and he trotted quickly across the avenue as a surge of traffic came roaring up. He had, I realized, waited for a moment when the pedestrian light showed the fierce red hand, and then taken his chance. Evidently he felt this gave him an edge--and it did, because it meant that, walking on down Sixth Avenue, he and I were signaled forward at every cross street by the purposeful white-glowing pedestrian whose missionary stride was plainly conceived as an example to all (and whom I cannot help contrasting with his London counterpart, a green gentleman undoubtedly rambling with an unseen golden retriever).

There is a whimsical quality (of the sort that we sometimes see in Hans' Fitzgeraldian precedent) to the descriptions of the walk icons. But this paragraph also sharply reveals Chuck's cunning, his knack for strategy in competitive environs, as well as Hans' quick ability to discern what his friend is up to. The comparison of the walking figures is telling as well -- the archetypal purposefulness of the genericized American contrasted with the mannerliness of his British equivalent. This kind of easy symbolism -- at once both effective and readily grasped by the reader -- pervades the whole of the novel. We see such symbolism throughout the novel not only in discussions of cricket -- which is what brings Hans and Chuck together -- but also in Hans' frequent lyrical descriptions of the clouds and sky, both as they appear to him in Manhattan and in other locales throughout the world -- everywhere Hans has been. (For a more thorough treatment of this subject, see James Woods' review of Netherland from The New Yorker.)

Netherland sometimes starts to fall flat when it comes to dialogue featuring Hans' co-workers and other born-and-bred Americans. It's not that the dialogue is poorly done; it's just that it sounds so jarring alongside the narration that the discord threatens temporarily to undermine the whole enterprise. These moments remind the reader of the improbability of a voice like the one Hans displays here, but they also serve as placeholders, in a way, marking off instances where we might find insight into the big idea that animates this novel. We have to be reminded that this in not a story about typical Americans in the old-fashioned sense.

In keeping with the novel's examination of a new American internationalism -- something that is less sought out by than it is thrust upon the nation -- O'Neill's characters have involved themselves to varying degrees in an attempt to replace our current (fading) national pastime with the promise of a new international one -- cricket, the sport favored by this burgeoning population of new Americans. Hans and Chuck are keenly aware of the far-reaching symbolic resonance of their sport and its ability to bring together people from different cultures -- everyone except for the Yanks, it seems. Chuck in all earnestness describes cricket as possessing a democratizing influence, helping to spread law, order, and civility throughout the world, and a more cautious but still somewhat dreamy Hans tells us, "I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice."

In this respect we come to find out what Netherland is really all about: personal lives adrift in the wake of policies of American exceptionalism in the early 21st century -- the personal up against the political once again -- only the politics here are more wrapped up in Chuck's attempt to achieve his grandiose dream, a world-class cricket field in New York, than they are with the about-to-erupt war in Iraq. Netherland is very bluntly a post-9/11 novel set in New York -- something that nobody has seemed to want to read until this book came out -- something that seemed impossible to pull off because of the weightiness of the subject. Despite its big themes, Netherland manages to avoid collapsing under its own weight. A few years ago, Don DeLillo's Falling Man started off with a powerful and compelling first chapter, then fizzled into a tepid drone. It took O'Neill's skewed outsider-insider perspective to make the post-9/11 novel work.

And in all, Netherland does work, though there are gaps in the story it tells that, like the patchy American dialogues, threaten to do harm to the potential long-term reputation of this book. The tidiness of the narration and the lyrical brilliance of the prose cannot disguise the fact that this is a sometimes messy novel, one in which the narrative core sometimes disappears, turning the novel into a series of riffs with no discernible rhythm. The problems are twofold: one has to do with Hans' estrangement from his wife, Rachel--an estrangement that for most of the novel seems predicated on narrative convenience rather than sprung from the characters' own devices; the second involves the supposed occasion for the novel, Chuck's cricket-field dream.

Chuck, whom Hans once describes as "a man cheerfully operating in the subjunctive mood," is the Gatsby to Hans' Nick, but the sliders of wealth and class have been tampered with, and O'Neill adds into the mix the inevitable intricacies of race dynamics. Chuck is still the relentless outsider trying to crack into a world of prosperity, but he has not gotten as far as Gatsby in terms of his grand ambitions, and we are aware from the start that he never will. And he has no Daisy -- just the figurative green light of aspiration, given over here to the more expansive and less pointed green turf of a cricket field. Chuck is also throughout much of the narrative less central to this novel than Gatsby is to his, and that is a discernible flaw here. The problem begins when we start to wonder what happens to Chuck -- not his ultimate fate, mysterious as that is, but rather his absence from the narrative at times, leaving us alone with the sometimes overly thoughtful, overly lyrical, and occasionally insubstantial Hans. Hans the character needs Chuck to give ballast to his life just as Hans the narrative creation needs Chuck to give ballast to the narrative. When Chuck is not there, we wonder where he is and why Hans has forgotten about him. It all makes Hans seem self-centered sometimes.

Ultimately, though, Hans serves us well as a substitute for Nick Carraway, though the two are different enough. Whereas Nick turns out not to have a mind for the world of finance, it's second-nature to Hans. Still, Hans claims, "I've never been open to the fantastical aspect of business. I'm an analyst--a bystander"--in other words, just what we need in a narrator. Nick seems nearly sexless in Gatsby, and oddly enough, for all of his inelegant talk about "f-cking" (which does seem tonally out of place at times--even though it is the 21st century), Hans is nearly sexless as well -- at least free of any overpowering desires. Perhaps we need the narrator of such a novel, though, to be free from such passion. Hans' Jordan Baker appears in the form of his estranged wife, Rachel, who has gone back to London after the terrorist attacks while Hans stays behind in a rented room at the Chelsea Hotel. We can tell from the start that Hans, like Nick, will not be a New Yorker for long, that he will end up going back from whence he came, and from the perspective he gains there tell us the story of his time in the city in retrospect.

Which brings me to one final thing that Netherland does for the reader: it helps to put the nature of the City in perspective. We need this kind of thing now and then, a reminder of the thrill of being in New York, of what it means to be there, whether just visiting or on a permanent basis. Apparently, to O'Neill (himself a New Yorker by way of several countries: Ireland, Holland, and England), the City means nothing less than civilization itself. Of the many post-9/11 New York incidents that illuminated the true nature of the city, we have the 2003 blackout, an incident that Hans rides out on the roof of the Chelsea. At first, there is gloom and doom in the forecast; to one resident, the blackout is nothing less than the utter collapse of civilization: "Basically we're going back to a time before artificial light. Every nut out there is going to be acting under cover of darkness. ... Turn off the lights, people turn into wolves." Before too long, though, a party is under way on the rooftop. Things get a little harried at the Chelsea that night (in the novel, at least), but essentially the message is that people recover from a catastrophe pretty readily. They do so because they have to. Maybe it is not so easy to fling something as evolved and complex as civilization -- or a marriage, for that matter -- into the wastebasket. Who knows -- civilization might even continue to thrive without cricket.

Upon reading Netherland, one has to wonder: is this the first great American novel of the 21st century? Will it, despite its flaws, be a work that endures? Of course, future generations will have to decide how relevant it is to them. In the meantime, I can posit for you an image that seems more than just a little bit likely: the stacks of undergraduate theses comparing Netherland to The Great Gatsby. Would it be too much of a stretch to say that civilization demands such things?