Netherland

Netherland
Joseph O’Neill
In “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master”. In Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, released in 2008 and a ubiquitous title on year-end lists, this poetic axiom is challenged—losing is hard, O’Neill suggests, and requires everything you have. The novel, described by James Wood as “a post-colonial retelling of The Great Gatsby” is in fact a fascinating inversion of the context of Fitzgerald’s novel. Where Gatsby rose in affluent East Egg amidst 1920’s high-spirits and optimism, Netherland takes place in a New York rattled by the events of 9/11 and a London politically confused and morally adrift, with its purported Gatsby-analogue, Chuck Ramkissoon, moving in subaltern circles, more Wolfsheim, perhaps, than Gatsby.
Personally, having gone into the book already expecting a Fitzgerald homage, I was surprised and happy to find out that while there are some thematic similarities, O’Neill for the most part tells an original story. This is less a “retelling of Gatsby” than simply an essentially pretty simple story about American identity—why it occasionally seems so familiar is that these are universal sentiments O’Neill is taking on, things entrenched in our national consciousness. By making his most important characters immigrants (Ramkissoon is from Trinidad and Hans van den Boek, the narrator, comes from London by way of Denmark) these traits are thrown into relief. Like every “American story” worthy of the title, Netherland focuses on outsiders attempting to find a way to incorporate themselves into the national jigsaw puzzle, financially, socially, emotionally, and spiritually. O’Neill strolls into the realm of easy clichés and proceeds to wreck up the place, flipping things over and turning them inside out until every familiar trope, the fat black gangster, the emotionally frigid businessman, the estranged marriage, the affair, the murder, the flashback, all the ingredients of a staggeringly mediocre novel, become strange and new. The most useful similarity between this novel and Gatsby is in fact their dissimilarity with the tropes of their time, their transformation of the mundane into the meaningful.
Another frequent claim is that Netherland is “a 9/11 novel,” which is in some ways just as untrue. While the events of 9/11 do play a major part in setting up the plot, most of this takes place before the novel begins, and while the narrative does jump back and forth from London in 2006 to New York in the early years of this century to Holland in the 70’s to Trinidad and back again, 9/11 is mostly dealt with as a catalyst rather than as an event in and of itself. The most poignant treatment of the event is near the end of the novel, when Hans is confronted with the difference between his first-hand experience of 9/11 and how his fellow upper-middle class European bankers it. Its less an act of physical violence in the novel so much as the heart of a chain-reaction upsetting social and cultural comforts and assurances, pitting him against himself, against his social class, and driving his family apart. Similarly, the novel takes more interest in what came out of 9/11—the war in Iraq, rising overseas frustration with the Bush presidency, paranoia in England. It lurks like a sort of sociopolitical big bang at the post-historical heart of the 21st century, a watershed for the new world Hans is forced to navigate. So no, Netherland is not a 9/11 novel, whatever that may be, any more than The Charterhouse of Parma is a Napoleon novel or The Moviegoer is a Mardi Gras novel. These novels take place in an atmosphere shaped and shaded by these events, but they are not tied to them plot-wise and take them as a starting rather than a focal point.
In Netherland, O’Neill, an Irish born, half-Turkish writer raised in the Netherlands, has written what is already being referred to as one of the great novels of the American tradition, one featuring a cast of immigrants, expatriates, aliens legal and otherwise, newcomers and outsiders. As a document of the start of this century it captures the restlessness and the sense of shifting boundaries like no other book I can think of. As a portrait of New York City it ranks with Bright Lights Big City, The Age of Innocence and Fortress of Solitude. It’s also easily the most (the only?) interesting book about cricket I’ve ever read. In a handful of years dominated by overhyped novels and memoirs of intense but fleeting interest, Netherland deserves every ounce of attention it has received.