It's just not cricket
Here
it comes, this year’s Great American Novel*, a shoo-in for
everything from the Pulitzer to a place on Oprah’s couch,
garlanded with praise in the UK alone from critics comparing it
to Banville, Bellow, Fitzgerald and Updike. Even James Wood in
The New Yorker loved it. And here I am, having disliked most of
the last handful of books I’ve read, keen for something
to love, just waiting to be seduced; frankly a pushover.
You’ll have predicted, from the breathlessness
above, that I didn’t love it as much as they did; indeed
I’m not sure I loved it at all. It was nonetheless worthwhile:
I got to wonder how different my experience of reading it was,
forearmed by all the orgiastic praise in the press, than it would
have been if I’d picked it up at random. Just as we inevitably
- consciously or not - give a book more consideration when we
know it’s an established classic, I think I must do the
same when I’m assured it’s a future classic. Certainly
it’s conceivable that, without any knowledge of other opinions,
I could have given up on Netherland early on. And that, just to
muddy the waters of opinion one last time in this paragraph, would
have been my loss.
The cover shows ice skating - a shrewd move, because
the recreational sport that the book really revolves around is
cricket, and a cover image of that would have limited sales dramatically,
irrespective of reviews. Yet it is cricket, or rather the idea
of cricket played by immigrants in New York, which is the great
idea that gives the book steel down its spine. This works obviously
as a metaphor both for the multicultural absorption of melting-pot
America and the essence of fair play (”I cannot be the first
to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket
field, is men imagining an environment of justice”), but
also adds a memorable, almost surreal note, and - crucially -
brings to mind the sporting elements of other would-be Great American
Novels (Rabbit’s basketball, Underworld’s
baseball, American Pastoral’s athletics). Netherland
also consciously evokes another American classic, with a passage
(which I didn’t mark in my copy and now, of course, can’t
locate) that parallels Jay Gatsby gazing out at the green light
of Daisy’s dock (and there’s mention of a boat on
the last page too).
O’Neill’s Gatsby is Chuck Ramkissoon,
who at the start of the novel is found dead in a canal. Our Nick
Carraway, filling us in as to how he might have got there, is
Dutch immigrant (via London) Hans van den Broek. He tells us:
Chuck valued craftiness
and indirection. He found the ordinary run of dealings between
people boring and insufficiently advantageous to him at the
deep level of strategy at which he liked to operate. He believed
in owning the impetus of a situation, in keeping the other guy
off balance, in proceeding by way of sidesteps. … The
truth is that there was nothing, or very little, I could have
done to produce a different ending for Chuck Ramkissoon.
Chuck is the founder of the cricket league which
Hans joins, and which yokes together the newcomers to New York,
as well as the elements of the novel. Otherwise, Hans spends a
good deal of time, narratively speaking, away from Chuck, which
is to the book’s detriment. His present day concern is the
reassembly of his fractured marriage, after his wife left him
to return to London with their child. Her move was in part inspired
by a sense of fear after the World Trade Center attacks, though
unlike other readers, I’m unconvinced that this makes Netherland
a “post 9/11? novel: except in the sense that it was published
in 2008, which is admittedly post 9/11. A more plausible link
might be in a growing sense of fear of difference which could
have led Chuck to fall foul of others, though Hans seems clear
enough that he was significantly the author of his own misfortune.
The centripetal influence of Chuck as a character
is welcome in a book which otherwise seems to dart about too much,
and leave traces in too many places to cohere in the way that
is achieved by so many of the books it’s been compared to.
I also found evidence of effort on too many pages: for every just-so
phrase (”ambulances sped eastward on West 23rd Street with
a sobbing escort of police motorcycles”) there’s a
tortured image (”a murky tank in which cheap fish hesitated
in weeds and an artificial starfish made a firmament of the gravel”),
a case of arrestable whimsy (”Taspinar explained that he
had dressed as an angel for two years now”), or plain clunkiness
(”I’d assumed that some unilateral failing of mine
had been at the bottom of our downfall; now it seemed that some
malfunction of Rachel’s might also have been operative”
- yes, he really did say might also have been operative).
There are other fine things worth mentioning, such
as the book’s acute sense of the importance of place in
personal memory and the prism of sentimentality through which
it’s often viewed, as when Hans reflects on New York once
he’s back in London (he’d been warned before going
to New York that he would always miss it if he left):
[In London], unchanged
is the general down-the-hatch, who-are-we-fooling light-heartedness
that’s aimed at shrinking the significance of our attainments
and our doom, and contributes, I’ve speculated, to the
bizarrely premature crystallization of lives here, where men
and women past the age of forty, in some cases even the age
of thirty, may easily be regarded as over the hill and entitled
to an essentially retrospective idea of themselves; whereas
in New York selfhood’s hill always seemed to lie ahead
and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks: that you
might have no climbing boots to hand was beside the point.
No doubt the book has many other qualities, spotted
by the critics, which passed me by. In short, my difficulty with
Netherland was that, while the central character of Chuck lit
up every page he appeared on, and the bold central image of cricket
in New York is a winner that will hold it widely in memory, the
book as a whole just never took off for me; enjoyment is a chemical
reaction between reader and book which either happens or doesn’t,
and no amount of critical appraisal can gainsay that.
* contractual terms require the use of this
phrase in all reviews of Netherland.
John
Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
