Netherland: A Novel by Joseph O'Neill Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Netherland: A Novel
Book Review: Don't think I can finish it.
Summary: 2 Stars
I probably shouldn't write a review of a book I haven't finished, but I agree with everyone else here who has given a negative review. I have a graduate degree in English, so I think I have a little bit of credibility when I say that this is not a good book.
The writing may occasionally be interesting, but most of the time it's not, especially when it's about cricket. The narrator is not likable (unless you are the narrator, he seems to think pretty highly of himself). I keep thinking something might happen that would make it worth reading, but after reading these reviews I don't think so. As someone told me today when I was complaining about this book, "Life is too short to read bad books."
Book Review: Enormously Disappointing
Summary: 1 Stars
That I am even writing this is evidence of my dislike. I have a million things to do, and yet, out of sheer disgust and disappointment, I must critique this work. That this earned the reviews it did, has made me more intrepid about reviving my own writing career. If this author, whose name I will never remember, since the work itself is immemorable, can write and get the reviews he did, so can I. So can You. So can my dog.
If there were beautiful sentences, I missed them! You want beautiful sentences, read Fitzgerald, to whom this author, shockingly, erroneously, has been compared. Read Roth's Everyman, Llosa's The Bad Girl, Petterson's Out Stealing Horses. You want a substitute for Ambien, read this novel.
My problem with this book is that I didn't care about the characters. Had I not recommended it for my book group, I wouldn't have finished it. (Having finished it, I can say I wouldn't have missed much!) Around page 175 I felt a twinge for the protagonist, Hans, the stirrings of feeling, but this didn't evolve into anything more significant. The female character was flat and unbelievable, which made Han's affection for her unbelievable. The Chuck character was uneven. He was like a sketch of a character. I felt as though the author didn't really know him. When, finally, something happens to him I thought, who cares? (Who's Chuck?)
The narrator spends a lot of time telling about the events in his life. but he is a royal bore, thus, so were his exegeses. I would launch into one of these paragraphs, and, midway through, substitute blah, blah, blah.
In my opinion, the author undertook a literary task that proved out of his league. He developed a depressed and disassociated first person narrator undergoing life altering experiences. Unlike say, Salinger or Roth or Petteron or Charles Baxter, he failed to make this narrator evoke feelings in the reader. There was a lot of telling in this book. I often had the impression the author himself wasn't intimate with his characters. I never got there.
Based on the reviews I read everywhere I recommended this dull mass of words to my book group and I am embarrassed. I plan to fill the time talking about all the other good books I recently read.
Book Review: Exquisite writing; a nearly "perfect" work of art.
Summary: 5 Stars
I, too, thought of Fitzgerald when I read this; "Gatsby" came to mind, the "perfect" novel. I don't understand the readers who were so negative about it. It's gorgeous, with lovely, rolling sentences and a wonderful, tragic view of the world after an apocalyptic event. I knew nothing about cricket, now I can't wait to learn more. What a lovely, lovely work of art. I hope this writer graces us with much more for years to come. Such deft prose is rare.Book Review: Extremely disappointing
Summary: 1 Stars
The only reason I finished this excruciatingly boring book is because I had to read it for book club -- hours of my life I will never get back.Book Review: FLYING DUTCHMAN
Summary: 5 Stars
We have to be careful with ethnic stereotypes these days, but perhaps it can be suggested without giving offence that the image of the Dutch bourgeoisie is one of rationality, level-headedness and emotions under control. Almost without exception in my experience, their command of English is perfect and they fit perfectly into careers in English-speaking nations. The narrator of Netherland is exactly such a Dutchman. In his career he is an effortless high-flyer, when separated from his wife and child he flies fortnightly to London from Niew Amsterdam to visit them without a financial qualm or any seeming sense of fatigue or jet-lag, he joins his family at a moment's notice and without any apparent change of pace in a holiday in Kerala, and his receptive imagination takes flight to Trinidad as well.
What is striking about Hans is that although a lot happens to him he is never the initiator of anything that happens. First his marriage falls apart, then by the end of the book it is getting together again, but his wife is the driver of both events. Intelligent, thoughtful and successful he may be, capable of a formidable amount of emotional resilience too, but tagging along like a tame dog in his wife's turbulent wake. Three extra-marital liaisons are mentioned, one in some detail. In this the woman seduces him, and when she then breaks off contact that's that and she is never even mentioned again. With the other two it seems to have been a similar story. Nothing of this nature is anywhere near as important to him as the game of cricket it seems. If anything in this superb novel strikes me as a little overdone it is the lengthy and loving musings on the great sport of the British Empire. It is only quite recently that I became aware that Holland and Ireland are making determined efforts to break into the imperial monopoly. Just how deep-rooted their love of the game is I am now beginning to understand from this tale put into the mouth of a Dutchman by an Irish author.
Cricket in America seems to be a game for either English émigrés (as in Waugh) or immigrants (as here). It is starting to follow soccer in being a big-money game, but the place where the money is to be made is clearly not the USA but India. Apart from the marriage/family theme, the other main narrative is of Hans's partial involvement, typically cautious, prompted and reactive on his part, with a cricket-minded immigrant entrepreneur who strongly recalls Gatsby, not least in the man's fate mentioned at the outset and partially explained near the end. I did not really find anything amounting to a theme with regard to 9/11 or the conflict in Iraq. They are mentioned because that is the timeframe in which the story is set and it would have been rather coy if they had not been referred to in a story largely taking place in New York, but the mentions are brief and incidental. It is true that Rachel cites the post-9/11 atmosphere as her reason for taking their son away from New York, but I fancy it's clear enough that if it had not been for that reason she would have found another.
This is the unfinished tale of a man whose emotions are genuine and deep - unfinished not (I hope) in the sense that there is going to be a sequel but because if anything is clear from the sequence of events here it is that neither Hans nor anyone else is likely to carry on from where the book leaves off in any placid nirvana. Hans's main characteristic is rationality. He is truthful with himself and can face up to his own shortcomings as he perceives them, but he is probably a bit too rational for his own good. If his life is going to be happy or fulfilled (whatever the latter might be in his case) that will only be so if others allow it to be. I found the whole novel to be one of the best and most involving that I have had the privilege of reading in years. I'm not myself inclined to read allegories or social/political messages into it. What this book possesses, for me, is human truth. The characterisation is exceptionally convincing, and it is helped by writing that I would describe as being of the highest quality. I do not normally have any great problem in putting novels down, but I certainly did with this one.