Book Discussion: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
Julian Brookes | Monday, June 1, 2009 11:49 AM
The acclaimed literary novel that President Obama read to get away from his briefing books.
One of this year’s most acclaimed novels, Netherland provides both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger and brilliantly achieved ambition: the grand strangeness and fading promise of twenty-first-century America from an outsider’s vantage point, and the complicated relationship between the American dream and its dreamers.
In post-9/11 New York City, Hans—a successful banker originally from the Netherlands—finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, exiled from home, family, and even himself, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant immigrant subculture of cricket (a boyhood passion of his) in New York’s outer boroughs. He is befriended by a charismatic Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, an entrepreneur-gangster with a grandiose plan to turn an unattended patch of park near JFK airport into an international cricket mecca. Chuck introduces Hans to an “other” New York, populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality. Hans is alternately seduced and instructed by Chuck’s particular brand of naivete and chutzpah, and his ability to hold fast to a sense of American and human possibility in which Hans has come to lose faith. What follows is an awakening of sorts for Hans—a chance for the recovery of a lost self—and a less fortunate outcome for Chuck.
Joseph O’Neill—born in Ireland, raised primarily in Holland, and now living in New York—is a keenly perceptive writer who deftly plays with the nature of time and memory and identity. In the Washington Post, Siri Hustvedt wrote: “O’Neill’s prose, in its conscientiousness and beauty, involves us utterly in the struggle for meaning that governs any single life.”
If that isn’t enough to persuade you to pick up this novel, consider this: President Obama, when asked in an April interview with the New York Times magazine whether he was reading “anything good,” responded that he’d grown so sick of his briefing books that in the evenings he was reading a novel–Netherland.
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To learn more about Netherland click here (includes reviews, author interview, and more).
Book Discussion: Sag Harbor
Julian Brookes | Friday, May 1, 2009 04:41 PM
A deeply affectionate and fiercely funny coming-of-age novel from one of America’s most acclaimed writers.
The year is 1985. Fifteen-year-old Benji Cooper is one of the only black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. He spends his falls and winters going to roller-disco bar mitzvahs, playing too much Dungeons and Dragons, and trying to catch glimpses of nudity on late-night cable TV. After a tragic mishap on his first day of high school—when Benji reveals his deep enthusiasm for the horror movie magazine Fangoria—his social doom is sealed for the next four years.
But every summer Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals have built a world of their own. Because their parents come out only on weekends, he and his friends are left to their own devices for three glorious months. And although he’s just as confused about this all-black refuge as he is about the white world he negotiates the rest of the year, he thinks that maybe this summer things will be different. If all goes according to plan, that is.
There will be trials and tribulations, of course. There will be complicated new handshakes to fumble through, and state-of-the-art profanity to master. He will be tested by contests big and small, by his misshapen haircut (which seems to have a will of its own), by the New Coke Tragedy of ’85, and by his secret Lite FM addiction. But maybe, with a little luck, things will turn out differently this summer.
In this deeply affectionate and fiercely funny coming-of-age novel, Whitehead—using the perpetual mortification of teenage existence and the desperate quest for reinvention—lithely probes the elusive nature of identity, both personal and communal.
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