Netherland is a novel that finds its most comfortable mode at the concentric cross-section of three genres – a tale of domestic strife, a sociological study, and a mystery novel. When all three themes are active, the story and its narrator are compelling and, at times, insightful. Pastoral descriptions of cricket, the death of a close friend, a struggling marriage, and the quirks of life in a metropolis all give the novel the impression of breadth, but the central theme is stated simply and early-on by Hans, the solipsist-banker narrator: “It is a truly terrible thing when questions of love and family and home are no longer answerable.” Whether this novel answers those questions in the end is entirely questionable.The story begins as Hans’ New York married life has dissembled itself in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which seems not be a meaningful concurrence. His wife has returned to her native England with their son in tow, and Hans, Dutch-born, is left behind, abandoned in his adopted city. His successful job as an oil futures analyst seems to be of little or no concern. Hans has a few friends in New York, but nearly all of his extra-familial relationships are of a single, disposable backdrop.
Happening upon a man with a cricket bat in the street, Hans rediscovers his childhood passion for the sport, and he sews the game to every key concept of home and family: his absent father, his doting mother, his proudest childhood achievement, and the lost lucid rules and structures of life that the sport allegorizes. His love for cricket predates the difficult adult situation in which Hans finds himself, and its simple genteel rules override the complexities of the post-9/11 world. He joins a Staten Island club team, and this sub-community of mostly south-Asian men becomes a surrogate family in his surrogate homeland. And, importantly, it is through cricket that Hans meets Chuck Ramkissoon.
Chuck is the true protagonist, in that he is the driving energy of Netherland: through him, all the disparate elements of Hans’ life are roped together to form a plot. Chuck is an entrepeneur; a small-time bookie; a professional philanderer; a permanent outsider from the circles to which he most wants to belong; a neuvo-Victorian romantic who dreams of becoming the Horatio Alger of American cricket; a fiercely patriotic immigrant; and a life instructor to the naïve and oblivious Hans. Chuck’s mysterious death is the premise of the story’s recollection – literally, as it is a montage of a story, one pulled together haphazardly – and his activities in Hans’ life form the spine of the plot’s continuity.
There have been many characters such as Ramkissoon in American fiction, from Captain Ahab to Jay Gatsby and Dean Moriary. These characters exist on the periphery of society and are “secondary” to the novels that they actually come to dominate. But this particular incarnation finds his closest relative in Ronaldo Cantabile, the low-level gangster who is the force behind Saul Bellow’s classic novel, Humbolt’s Gift.
Just as Hans is taken on as a playmate, plaything, and project by Chuck, so is Charlie Citrine, the narrator of Humbolt’s Gift, claimed by the charismatic Ronaldo Cantabile after an altercation over a gambling debt. Cantabile is a farcical low-level mobster who tries at every turn to involve Citrine in his plans, to teach him life-lessons, and to find some kind of justification for himself in Citrine’s high social status. The way Ramkissoon uses the “respectable-looking white guy” Hans as an unwitting driver to raise his status in the eyes of his marks is remarkably similar to Cantabile using Charlie Citrine to the same end.
Bellow’s protagonists are often natives and outsiders, at conflict with themselves, upper-class, neurotic, and introspective – all of these characteristics echo in Hans. It seems fair to say that O’Neill has written an interpretation, or re-casting, of Bellow’s iconic American fiction. This isn’t particularly problematic. Great authors steal, they say, and it is the sort of homage that at least reveals some admirable level of ambition. O’Neill was probably wise to choose Bellow as a model: both have a reflective strain and a desire to deal with contemporary life. It is understandable that so many critics have fallen so hard for Netherland, as well. O’Neill here bears the recognizable visade of a master, and the comparison is its own form of praise. But the similarities between these two authors end with their similar tendencies, for in all the ways that Bellow mastered the balance between rhetorical flourish, character study, and serious insight, O’Neill comes up short.
Netherland is packed with gift-wrapped reflections that tend, too often, to die as soon as they’re opened – fruit-flies of insight, which are rarely worked out in the plot or the character – such as “New York – that ideal source of the metropolitan diversion that serves as a response to futility itself – took on a fearsome, monstrous nature whose reality might have befuddled Plato himself.” But, why? Not why hyperbole regarding New York, vulgar and uninteresting as it is, but why would Plato – father of the ideal form – be interested at all in reality? No, O’Neill / Hans actually means Aristotle, but the lazy name-dropping denies what could’ve been an interesting, if over-wrought, observation. This was an endemic weakness of the novel, a promising but only half-thought-through concept that is eventually just frustrating.
So many opportunities were missed, or ignored, in favor of eliciting a cheap emotional response – maybe the influence of so-called Magical Brooklyn. Hans opines that “there’s no such thing as cheap longing, I’m tempted to conclude these days, not even if you’re sobbing over a cracked fingernail,” and later that “wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition.” These both strongly recall the writing of Dave Eggars. It is as if, by admitting their shallow nature, these emotions somehow become more meaningful. But these lines also seem to be more the author speaking than Hans: his character is much truer when he says, “it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state.” How can this same, disinterested character possibly defend “cheap longing?”
Standing out from the maze of dead-ends is the moment when Hans notices “Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness.” This is not a particularly original concept, but the point is later dramatized by the estranged family vacation, in a way other insights are not. For that reason, it is one of the book’s more thoroughly engaging ideas, and one that stayed on my mind after I’d shut the book. There were some wonderfully idiosyncratic descriptions as well: at the DMV, “Perplexed and rebuffed Chinese men wandered everywhere;” or that, when one character's “baroque anguish, too awful and strange for me to think about, became acute, he neglected himself.” Here the language is precise and evocative, neither stretching too far in order to seem new, nor tangled in quasi-technical syntax – it is the narrator / author at his best.
Hans is far less intellectual than Bellow’s often were, and so he is consequently unable to draw on the same wealth of culture and knowledge to cut through events into their Meanings – the (poor) reference to Plato at once creates the expectation of a search for truths, but shows clearly that Hans lacks the tools. This fact set simply unproductive limits, feeling at times as if O’Neill were purposefully holding back for the sake of his Hans’ mundane sensibilities.
But that is still no excuse for the mass of poorly-styled passages. O’Neill tries, and very often fails, to verify Hans’ self-professed “clunking lexical precision.” In these passages sub-clauses breed sub-clauses, and they even more, like the string of islands for Bishop’s Dafoe. If the technique had been used consistently, then it could be considered part of the narrative style and voice, to be judged successful by that set of standards. But Hans’ clunking language came in intense surges and then disappeared for pages, seemingly at random, and paled next to the moments of clarity and precision – a sustained control of language is glaringly absent from the novel.
Netherland is uneven and, in the end, disappointing – it has some excellent passages on the meanings of home and family, most of which unwind around the charismatic Chuck Ramkissoon – but it has too many equally poor sections, too many complete dead-ends. The weaker passages seem too obviously shallow, and their failures only more sorry for the flourishes of talent and the possibility of important insight. It is an ambitious novel, so fulfilling its own set of expectations is a difficult task. Perhaps the answer for a writer of O’Neill’s inclinations is to follow his own Virgil more closely, and to choose narrators that have a greater capacity for insight. Netherland remains one of those frustrating novels that’s good, and clearly could’ve been excellent; that will be, and has been, lauded by critics; and that is, hopefully, a sign of good things to come.
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