Netherland by Joseph O’Neil
If you read many book reviews or book blogs, you’ve no doubt been exposed to the hype surrounding Joseph O’Neil’s Booker-listed novel. If it’s not the most positively reviewed book of the year, it has to be close. Sadly, I cannot disagree with the consensus. Netherland may not win the Booker—indeed, my vote still goes to Sebastian Barry—but it will put O’Neil firmly among the list of top young writers.
Though O’Neil is a strange breed of European mutt—born in Ireland, raised in Holland, schooled in England—he has generated one of the best books about New York City that I have read in recent years. The story is narrated by Hans van den Broek, a Hollander who is living in Manhattan after establishing a career and a young family in England. To all appearances, van den Broek takes the stage to tell us about the mysterious death of Chuck Ramkissoon, an energetic and charismatic man hailing from Trinidad-Tobago. This somewhat traditional plot conceit, a sort of whodunit, provides a false backbone for the novel, however, and anyone expecting a story in the classic fashion will be disappointed.
The brilliance of Netherland comes in the way the narration departs from the traditional linear styles. Perhaps because he is adrift in a sort of depression caused by the one, two punch of September 11th and his estrangement from his wife and son, Van den Broek is a very distractible narrator. He seems unable to keep his attention from being swept into the various eddies of his mind, shifting it across times and situations. The effect is not jarring—the segues are always smooth—but it could frustrate a reader determined to reach point G from point F without making stops at B, H, X, and A along the way. Such frustration would be unfortunate, however, since it is these stops that explode the novel into a multidimensionality that could not otherwise be attained. We get an intimate sense of Hans’ distress over his marriage, his sense of homelessness, the state of NYC in the years following the fall of the towers, and the way a game like cricket can provide the stitching that holds a life together when all else gives way.
Though van den Broek has a wandering mind, he has moments of clarity about his situation that are all the more striking for their contrast with his Hamlet-like paralysis.
…if I was indeed embracing an American lot, then I was doing so unprogrammatically, even unknowingly. Perhaps the relevant truth—and it’s one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I’m sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me—is that we find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.
These moments of insight are so crystalline, that one wonders, at moments, how someone so perspicacious can seem so rudderless. That, though, is the paradox of an intelligent person’s depression.
If I still side with The Secret Scripture over Netherland for the Booker, it is only because the former is such a perfectly bound package of a novel that it cannot be overlooked. But perhaps in so favoring it, I am missing Netherland’s greatest accomplishment: that its rough edges are precisely what are appropriate for the psyche of its narrator.
