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?
Right now I'm only halfway in but I did find it interesting to read the argument about the war between Hans and Rachel and think back to Daisy and Henry. Why is it always the women getting upset and protesting while the men argue against them, or at least don't agree?
ReplyDeleteI have to admit, I'm always a bit skeptical about post-9/11 books as I often feel the media has taken the tragedy and run with it, capitalizing on feelings of patriotism and guilt to make a buck. I know when I worked at a movie store everyone was renting World Trade Center- not because they seemed interested, but because they felt it was their duty. And while sometimes I feel it gets laid on a little thick here, and in Saturday, it's not too bad, overall. Sad that overexposure has, in some ways, cheapened a real tragedy.
As for our President reading it, well, I've never been an Oprah book club type, but maybe an Obama book club...?
I agree that it was sometimes laid on a little thick, especially with the whole liberal-hysterical-woman trope, which immediately put me off. The depiction of Rachel was, I felt, very problematic, and though I think this gets palliated somewhat at the end (in the brief passage wherein the narrator defends his friendship with Chuck and the value of being taken at face value), the overall profile seemed more like a caricature than anything else.
ReplyDeleteI do, however, always find it fascinating when novels depict real private torment over the attacks. I felt so disconnected from them, even after watching days worth of television. The only time I felt real fear was when my roommate Victor and I read the Patriot Act to one another, cover to cover. It's strange how _Netherland_ glosses over some of the real fallout, or (again) caricatures it in these bizarre ways--the references to the Iraq war are "sympathetic" in the worst possible way, and the political discussions are tinged with that disturbing hollowness that I suppose I recognize from my own initial reaction to 9/11.
I don’t even know where to begin with a conversation about this book. I’m worried that I’m just going to spend the whole time gushing, which I probably will, but I guess that’s okay. For the first time in a long time, I truly had one of those prostrate-on-the-floor, up-all-night, where-have-you-been-all-of-my-life reading experiences that I haven’t had since I read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, and, before that The Great Gatsby. I’d say that all of the comparisons to Gatsby are relevant. Like Gatsby, Netherland is pitch-perfect, not a sentence out of place. It’s so finely crafted, but not artificially so. In other words, at least for me, the craft never draws attention to itself. The writing flows, and the transitions, between past and present, memory and reality, fantasy and daydream, are seamless. There are few quite-so-perfect novels in the world. If only there were more.
ReplyDeleteWhich is why I had such trouble comprehending the aggression behind Zadie Smith’s review of the book. First, I felt that her premise was predicated on some fairly flimsy claims. She begins by setting up the false dichotomy that all novels fall into one of two camps. There is, for Smith, no in-between, only “two paths for the novel.” The first path is the path of “lyrical Realism,” represented by Netherland. The second path is less well-defined, but might fairly be termed “experimental” or “metafictional,” as Smith looks to authors like “Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace” for representation. She then argues that such postmodern writers have been “dismissed” by critics. She also argues that lyrical realism is some sort of predominant force in American fiction and that metafiction gets no attention. She praises Tom McCarthy’s Remainder for being ironical, wry, and open to “expressions of perverse, self-ridiculing humor.” She also argues that, while in “healthy times,” readers “cut multiple roads” for narrative, “these aren’t particularly healthy times.”
Wow.
Hmmmm.
Okay: First, I don’t know what Smith means by “healthy times,” but I think that her argument is completely unsubstantiated. She’s saying that we can’t have both novels at the same time, currently, so we must pick one, and she picks McCarthy’s. But, my question is this: Why can’t we have both? Since when are we resigned to such choices? Take Fitzgerald, for example, who Smith pegs as a lyrical Realist of the worst sort. But has she read him beyond Gatsby? How about the Interview with Beauty, complete with stage directions, in Beautiful and the Damned. How about the chapter in Tender is the Night wherein all of the characters suddenly acknowledge that they’re in a book’s plot and squabble over who’s a minor character and who’s “in the plot?” So, don’t tell me that one can’t write in both modes, and don’t tell me that I, as a reader, can’t pick up both Netherland and Remainder and enjoy and appreciate both equally, if for different reasons.
Surprise: One of George Saunders’s favorite writers is Raymond Carver. Scandalous!
Secondly, where has Smith been for the last ten years? This is the age of McSweeneys, of irony and brainy, self-deprecating humor, of Saunders and Eggers and Diaz and Millhauser. Donald Barthelme’s unpublished stories have just been reissued and he’s all the rave. David Foster Wallace’s death has left a gaping hole in the writing community. Don’t tell me that metafictional writing is dead or unappreciated by readers and writers. It’s “the thing” right now. It’s what’s en vogue. And, as for critics, well, it was Harold Bloom who said that the only American writers working after 1950 who will be remembered are DeLillo, Pynchon, and Ashbery, and too many people for my comfort agree with him. So, I don’t know what Smith is talking about.
Netherland is an impressive book. I found it beautiful. If that makes me a sap, so be it. But I don’t think that O’Neill was asking to be some poster child of contemporary Realism, and so I’m not sure that it’s fair for Smith to tear him down in order to vent her frustrations with the genre in general (her own genre, weirdly, by the way).
One more thing. Smith criticizes the novel’s ending for its sentimentality, but let me ask you this: If we are in the age of wry humor and anti-sentiment, the age of detachment and disaffectedness in fiction, isn’t there something terribly bold and even transgressive about trying to render a moment honestly, to risk sentiment, to acknowledge that, yes, people staring at the beams of light in the place of the towers following the events of September eleventh would experience real emotion? Why pretend otherwise?
I, like Jamie, struggled with Smith’s review, though maybe for different reasons.
ReplyDeleteDoes O’Neil make a kind of “noli me tangre” argument in Netherland when he acknowledges that certain scenes of the novel are cliché or contrived convention? I don’t know for certain, but if you want to look at the novel more forgivingly (and I’m inclined to do so) you could argue that by doing this O’Neil is at once acknowledging that we live in a world of simulacra, and yet those simulacra are still affecting. We are unable to get away from prior representations of experience, and so are left to do the best we can cobbling an experience together from these received images of experience. No, our lives are not authentic, the only problem is that we have to live them anyway. These lives can’t hope to escape the pre-scripted archetypes laid out for them by television, movies, ideology, whatever (pick your “bad guy”). Our best hope is to settle in to some kind of comfort (or self-acknowledgement) within these archetypes.
For example, Smith cites as the argument between Rachel and Hans about the Iraq war. To Smith, this evidences Han’s solipsistic turn away from the “abstract” nature of world politics towards the “real” world of his immediate surroundings. To Smith, this is a kind of “celebration of the self” at the expense of the world. However, she’s misrecognizing what’s going on. The war isn’t a generality, but our experience of it is. Rachel wants to express outrage about the war, but really just ends up repeating the hollow rhetoric of talking heads. Likewise, Rachel wants to express outrage about her husband and their relationship, but can’t. The script hasn’t been written, and so instead she falls back on a previous script of outrage she’d heard elsewhere from ideologues on the left, despite that fact that the script doesn’t match the situation at all. It’s the best she can do with what she’s got, and it’s why the scene is so pathetic. Hans, unable to tap into any “real” experience of the war (after all, despite living in New York, he saw the same September 11th the rest of us saw) is unable to speak “authentically” and so avoids speaking on it entirely. Likewise, he doesn’t posses the language to discuss what’s going on between him and Rachel (indeed O’Neill doesn’t seem to have the language either) and so falls to describing what’s around him (Hans), the empirical world being that only thing which at that moment he (O’Neill) can describe (precisely because it’s been done so many times). The text could almost be seen as being mimetic in this manner. O’Neill isn’t trying to show us that escaping into the empirically observable is somehow living an authentic life, and such a gesture is not a negation of simulacra in which we live.
So, when Hans takes solace in the “prefabricated symbolism” of the Ferris wheel ride, what should he do? Is this experience contrived? Yes, so much so that it’s a product to be sold (I’m assuming he paid to ride this thing). However, how could you ever ride a Ferris wheel and not fall victim to cultural representations of Ferris wheels? Even if you somehow managed to get on one without having ever heard of what they were, your memory of it would eventually be spoiled the first time you see a Ferris wheel represented in a movie. Hans (and O’Neill) recognize this. This recognition isn’t a dismissal, however. He’s not giving us a “real” portrayal of a cliché to demonstrate that clichés can be real; he readily acknowledges that clichés pre-exist us, and the fact that we live them does not make them “real.” O’Neill isn’t trying to render the experience authentic here. This isn’t escapism or a weird kind of double negative where meeting cliché with cliché somehow gets you to authentic, but rather something else.
No, experience (and its reciprocal significance) can never be wholly authentic. There is always a disconnect between the characters lives in the “real” world and the characters lives. Name one character that says what they “mean,” does what they say, or “means” what they do. Almost none of the characters are living their lives as they exist in “reality;” at best, O’Neill’s characters are living a version of their lives, that version being manipulated by any number of fictions, some chosen, some not.
I agree with everything here. I think Smith's complaint about the nature of authenticity is, itself, solipsistic. If metanarrative generates authenticity by virtue of its winking, self-referentiality, then surely it owes that self knowledge to the clichés of life at which it winks. Reflection in the mirror of irony does not transubstantiate lived experience; it merely throws a subjunctive mood onto it. If anything, O'Neill recognizes this fact and has his character resort to the only strategy that makes sense for someone living in an alienating and alienated landscape: Hans attempts to engage with reality on levels that he understands. If this means retrieving a paradigm of memory and experience from a past that made sense (obviously cricket for one) to better understand the present, it can be no more or less authentic an experience than the metanarrative response to the same thing. In any case, I would argue that Hans is fully aware of his own role as the protagonist in his drama, as evidenced by his musings on sitting with faux-angels, his painful self-consciousness at reinforcing the stereotype of white men’s physical clumsiness during the clubhouse dance or his reflections on the twin towers as both signifier and signified. Smith’s need for fiction to comment on itself seems to be driven more by distrust of the agency of the autonomous self generally than by any particular problem in Netherland.
ReplyDeleteI sort of feel like Netherland blows Saturday out of the water. I agree with Jamie (not to reduce his comment, what's coming is my pablum): Netherland is really pretty and well written. I'm totally ignorant about fiction, but I appreciate many of the beautifully wrought descriptive passages in Netherland the way I would a certain kind of poem. I found it really interesting that the word "flaneur" appeared in the novel -- it seemed like a big clue to me. I was just reading some Baudelaire and trying to make a connection to Netherland, because I think their might be one somewhere. "Ennui," malaise, Hans's total numbness. Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, the poor. Compare, perhaps, Hans’s brand of urban spleen to something like this:
ReplyDelete“A curious thing to note: not one of these travelers seemed to resent the ferocious beast hanging around his neck and glued to his back; apparently they considered it a part of themselves. All those worn and serious faces showed not the least sign of despair; under the depressing dome of the sky, with their feet deep in the dust of the earth as desolate as the sky, they went along with the resigned look of men who are condemned to hope forever.” (Baudelaire “To Every Man His Chimera”)
I don’t know how valuable that is, and I sort of wanted to bring up something of the sort in class on Monday, but didn’t quite know how to work in a so huge a digression. I don’t, obviously, mean to connect Baudelaire and O’neill on a formal level. I only wanted to say that I felt the same kind of urge/impulse at work. The dead-eyed Hans really got under my skin (as was obvious from my many comments on his “creepiness”). I don’t know enough about history (god, I’m not doing my image any favors, am I?) to make an intelligent comment about France in 1869 vs. 2003 New York/London, but I was just wondering if anyone else got the same vibe &/or whether it’s even worth discussing…
I forgot to highlight explicitly the phrase "men are condemned to hope forever" --that was the main connection. I'm having a dumb-day. Tut mir Leid, yall.
ReplyDelete*"men who are" jeSUS.
ReplyDeleteGreg, I think your remarks about Hans as flaneur are very interesting! I hadn't noticed that the term was used in Netherland. You should check out Walter Benjamin's work on Baudelaire and the flaneur as metaphor for modernity; it would be a useful way of making the link between Hans and Baudelaire's conception of the flaneur explicit.
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