Few recent novels appear to have been praised as highly as
Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. It won
the PEN/Faulkner award; the New York
Times called it “stunning” and one of the best books of the year; James
Wood, in The New Yorker, called it
“exquisitely written” and said it showed “deep human wisdom” (as opposed to
animal wisdom? I wonder); the Times Book
Review said it “had more life inside it than ten very good novels”; and,
hell, even Barack Obama liked it, calling it “a wonderful book.” It has
probably sold some 300,000 copies so far.
So I read
it. The writing is indeed exquisite. The protagonist, Hans van den Broek, is a
drip, but at least he is preoccupied with a compelling antagonist, a
Trinidadian con man named Chuck Ramkissoon. Hans occupies the Nick Carroway
position, while Chuck is rather transparently a Great Gatsby of sorts. And I
thought it rather clever of O’Neill to switch Gatsby’s meditation on class to a meditation on race and origin.
In
addition, one of the things that has made this novel so compelling to readers
is its pitch-perfect evocation of post-9/11 New York. The book ranges all over
the five boroughs, from a cricket field in Staten Island to Floyd Bennett Field
in Brooklyn, from Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel to the haunts of taxi drivers in
Queens. One of the most delightful things about Netherland is wondering where in New York you’ll end up next--and
whom you’ll meet there.
But when it
comes to the larger picture, unfortunately, O’Neill has nothing fresh to say.
Ramkissoon is a man of constant action, big dreams, brilliant talk--everything
Hans clearly wishes he was himself but has long ago given up hope of ever
being. Hans is a millionaire stock trader cursed with a pathological
passiveness, acquiescing to every suggestion, hopelessly in love with his
cold-hearted wife and, when she spurns him for no good reason that he can find
(though the reader can easily supply one: Hans is--though he never realizes it,
not even at his most self-critical--a terrible bore), he becomes suddenly taken
with anyone with darker skin than himself. (Spoiler alert: stop reading this post
if you plan to read the book.) And it’s not just the oh-so-mysterious Chuck--in
the only sex scene in the entire book Hans hooks up with a black woman who asks
him to whip her. And he does! (Like I said, he pathologically acquiesces to
every suggestion.) Chuck, of course, turns out to be a bad guy, a gangster,
though the reader realizes this far before Hans does, and also realizes that
he’s not really any worse than Hans himself, though Hans will never come to
that conclusion--millionaires who whip black women and gangsters who beat up
small-time businessmen are apparently not
equivalents in his world. Hans’s cluelessness about all this made me want to
throw the book across the room--in one scene he comes across concrete evidence
of Chuck’s thuggish ways and it takes him two pages to comprehend what he has
seen (I comprehended it immediately and was appalled by Hans’s--and
O’Neill’s--need to explicate it).
But this is
nothing compared to the author’s grotesque insistence on Chuck’s inner
jungle-like nature. After Hans discovers what Chuck is capable of, he breaks
off all contact, but Chuck reappears only to deliver a monologue that goes on
for pages about his youth in Trinidad’s jungles, replete with dangerous snakes
and Shango-Baptist feasts. The apparently charming, ambitious, clever black man
turns out to be, well, a jungle bunny, if you don’t mind my not mincing words.
This allows Hans the blessed opportunity to renounce his black envy (though, of
course, never explicitly), leave New York, reunite with his wife and child, and
return to the far more comfortable and less mysterious land of London, at last
happy and comfortable in his lily-white skin.
I should
add here that part of my distaste is probably due to my occupying a similar
position to Hans’s once upon a time. When I lived in Brooklyn I, as a volunteer
for an AIDS organization, befriended a blind and dying Trinidadian
Yoruba-Baptist preacher named Lionel, who, over the course of eighteen months
or so, took me to a half-dozen of his wild feasts, in which colorfully dressed
Trinidadian Brooklynites became possessed by African orishas, poured strange
libations in the corners of rooms, walked into the freezing waters of the
Atlantic Ocean so that trays of brightly colored cakes could float out to the
horizon, and so on. Joseph O’Neill has, apparently, never been to one of these
feasts himself, since he has Chuck say, “The Baptist Church is this Trinidad
brew of Christian and African traditions--you’ll see them in Brooklyn on a
Sunday, wearing white and ringing bells and trumpeting the spirit.” Wearing
white? Ringing bells? Trumpeting the spirit? How about men dancing with a
bottle of rum in one hand and a machete in the other, possessed by malevolent
spirits, and having to be wrestled to the ground so that they don’t hurt
anyone? How about half-naked girls dancing on all fours to the beat of
polyrhythmic drumming at three in the morning in a hot candle-lit Brooklyn
basement? Of course, all this fascinated me, but I knew better than to pretend
that Lionel--or any of his bizarre male lovers or gossippy female
friends--symbolized my dark side. O’Neill may count himself in good
company--after all, he’s following in the footsteps of Joseph Conrad and Herman
Melville--but one would hope that black people symbolizing the dark side of
white people would be, by the twenty-first century, a thing of the past.
(And
perhaps it’s better not to dwell on Joseph O’Neill’s treatment of Jews. The
only Jewish character, Abelsky, is easily the most loathsome creature in the
book, a caricature of the sweaty, swarthy, money-grubbing, fat, ignorant Jew;
O’Neill also takes pleasure in poking fun at kosher certification, and the word
Jew appears to signify “money-loving” in the few places it appears.)
My skin
crawled when I read this book. Why didn’t Michiko Kakutani’s or Barack Obama’s
or James Wood’s? At least Zadie Smith condemned the book for its shilly-shallying ways.
Her review, written for the New York
Review of Books, is here.