Introducing Joseph O'Neill and Netherland

Half-Turkish and half-Irish, Joseph O'Neill was born in County Cork, Ireland in 1964. Raised in Ireland and the Netherlands, and trained as a barrister in England, O'Neill has nonetheless become a permanent fixture (along with his wife, the noted critic and Vogue editor, Sally Singer) in the Chelsea Hotel in New York. A large portion of Netherland, published in 2008, is set in the (in)famous Chelsea and uses the hotel to establish the ramparts of the bohemian community its protagonist finds in the wake of 9-11 and his wife's desertion.

O'Neill's most celebrated novel, Netherland garnered rave reviews from the New York Times Book Review and made its way onto the Times' yearly top ten list. Prior to Netherland, O'Neill had published two novels, but was best known for his non-fiction account of his family, Blood-Dark Track. Netherland manifests a similar preoccupation with family history, alongside an interest in the aftermath of trauma, personal and collective. As you read Netherland, compare it to Saturday. How do both novels deal with depicting the world after the great historical rupture of 9-11? How does an interest in the private realm co-exist with a concern with more public forms of grief in these works? What do you make of novelist Zadie Smith's criticism of the novel? Most importantly: what do we make of the fact that we're reading the same book as our new President?

Ian McEwan and Plagiarism Accusations

For your perusal, another interesting story about McEwan that was circulating a few years back...

Ian McEwan and Saturday

With Ian McEwan and Saturday, we are straying across the Atlantic to provide a point of comparison to the American fiction we're reading this quarter. McEwan, like Roth, has been fairly prolific. Born in 1948, he has produced not only Saturday (2005) and the award-winning Atonement (2001), but also a long list of earlier works that earned him the title of "Ian Macabre." In The Cement Garden (1978), Enduring Love (1997), and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), McEwan explores themes such as incest and the "enduring" love of a stalker for his prey. Also manifest in these early works is McEwan's growing preoccupation with the battle between reason and unreason, science and religion, and chaos and ethics--themes that will find their culmination in the work we'll be reading for class.

In many ways, McEwan's career, and particularly his work in Saturday, illustrate a return to ethics and a new humanism in twenty-first century letters. Hailed as one of the first great works composed subsequent to 9-11, Saturday has also consistently come under fire for its adherence to the tenets of formal realism and its reliance on traditional humanistic discourse as an antidote to the "barbarism" of the terrorists' threat. How might we read McEwan's rendering of the life of Perowne? What does the style of the novel and its interest in science and reason say about McEwan's discursive preoccupations? What does it say about the rupture that terror can create in the everyday? Is it, as Banville argues, a somewhat conservative novel? Can a novel be conservative?

Roth and American Pastoral

Philip Roth is one of America's most prolific and successful authors. Many critics have marked him as a likely recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature at some point during the coming years. When the New York Times asked hundreds of the most prominent critics, writers, and editors to pick the best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years, six of Roth's novels made the top spot repeatedly. The essay accompanying the results of this survey stated that "[i]f we had asked for the single best writer of fiction over the past 25 years, [Roth] would have won."

Roth was born in 1933 and grew up near Newark, NJ--much like the protagonists of American Pastoral and many other Roth novels. He was recognized at a young age, publishing Goodbye, Columbus in 1959 (when he was just 26). After receiving the National Book Award for this volume in 1960, he went on to publish a number of other texts that form the fundament of postwar American literary fiction. From 1969's Portnoy's Complaint to 1979's The Ghost Writer to more recent works, such as American Pastoral (1998), The Plot Against America (2004), and The Human Stain (2000), Roth has managed to write books richly evocative of the era in which he and his readers live. The book we'll be reading in class--American Pastoral--is one of Roth's more recent, but it manifests many of the themes that have preoccupied the author since the beginning of his career. Dubbed the first of Roth's "American trilogy" (I Married A Communist and The Human Stain being the second and third members of the triumvirate), American Pastoral marks the birth of a new historically-conscious and socially- panoramic Roth at the same time that it continues to explore the relationship between men and women and the way they negotiate the vagaries of power in their sexual relationships, one of Roth's long-time themes. In American Pastoral, Roth is also deeply interested in the links between autobiography and writing, as well as those between the family and the individual, in American Pastoral. As you read American Pastoral, think of how its rendering of American culture compares to that put forward by Diaz and Danticat. What picture of contemporary America emerges in Roth's novel? What does it say about the conflict between Depression era and Vietnam era America, not to mention the links between Jewish American and American postwar exceptionalism?

Papa Doc and The Dew Breaker

The Dew-Breaker often references the history of Haiti and particularly the repercussions of dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier's reign on the Haitian people. All the characters in Danticat's book of linked stories suffer from their associations with the violence of Duvalier's Haiti and attempt to understand how to live with the decisions they made in a society where every individual was either "hunter or prey," as Ka's father describes it in the first story of the collection. I'm providing you with the following links to get more acquainted with him as you read The Dew-Breaker. Please post any comments on the book or the interplay of history in the lives of the character's in Danticat's book below.

List of Duvalier links:

Papa Doc's Wiki page

Another article on Duvalier reign

Site about Haitian history

Danticat and the Dew Breaker

Edwidge Danticat spent the first twelve years of her life in Haiti before moving to a Haitian-American community in Brooklyn. Educated at Barnard College and Brown University, she came to prominence at a very young age with the publication of her first book, Breath, Eyes, Memory in 1994. Attaining widespread critical praise upon its publication, this book made Danticat one of the first Haitian-identified author to achieve renown in the United States. The acceptance of her work is seen to mark the beginning of a belated opening of American literary culture to the stories of women and people of color.

Danticat's writing focuses on a number of themes we'll discuss in class--from the power of the past to the importance of telling stories in order to construct an identity. Her work also often represents another theme fundamental to our work in class, her sense of feeling pulled between a number of cultures: Haitian and American; black and white; English- and French Creole- speaking; the political and the literary. The Dew-Breaker is a particularly interesting book to read alongside The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao because it shares many of the central preoccupations of Diaz's novel (not to mention the fact that Danticat and Diaz are good friends). However, Danticat's book more directly addresses the questions about torture and human rights that Diaz's novel introduces. Also, unlike Oscar Wao, The Dew-Breaker is not a conventional novel, but a series of linked stories that function much as a novel does. As you read, think about how Danticat's choice to render the narrative in this way affects your experience of The Dew-Breaker. What are your first impressions of the book?

Junot Diaz's Top Book Picks

From Newsweek:

The Dominican-born author ("Drown") nabbed a Pulitzer for "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," his debut novel about a "ghetto nerd" striving to be the next J.R.R. Tolkien. His list:
My Five Most Important Books

1. " Beloved " by Toni Morrison. You can't understand the Americas without this novel about the haunting that is our past.


2. " Texaco " by Patrick Chamoiseau. The Caribbean masterpiece: it inspired nearly all of my first novel's literary experiments.

3. " Ceremony " by Leslie Marmon Silko. A profound survival story that becomes an act of healing in itself.

4. " Poison River " by Beto Hernandez. I have trouble describing how awesome this thing is: weird, sexy, tender, cruel and hopeful.

5. " Woman Warrior " by Maxine Hong Kingston. For immigrant writers, which in the end all of us are, this memoir is the Alpha.

A Book You Always Return To: Samuel R. Delany's "Dhalgren," which best captures that late '60s eruption that has shaped so much of what we call the Now.

A Book You Hope Parents Will Read To Their Kids: Richard Adams's "Watership Down," which is about the very thing kids dream of: that something small can still be a hero.