One of my friends, who is bemused by my general policy of abstinence from modern novels, walked me over to the Porter Square Bookshop in Somerville to purchase me a copy of Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. I read the first page and saw the prose was taut enough for me to give it a try. He had his doubts – after one or another Miltonic tirade of mine against the wretched Matter and lame Meter of the Age, he fingered the book and said, “I don’t know, I may have oversold this.” But I read it, not without some pleasure. It was my companion on the Fung Wah bus to New York (which now departs from South Station, my how times have changed – you no longer have to go into that Chinese restaurant for tickets), then on the J train to Richmond Hill, where I finished it.
It’s a light, easy read. The book is mostly set in New York, and the Outer Borough bits are accurately descriptive and charming to see in print (who ever thought you could write about Floyd Bennett Field or Delafield Avenue on Staten Island?). The Outer Borough characters (who are few, to be honest) have a great deal of vitality. I adduce as evidence a speech of a fat Brooklyn Russian Jew named Mike Abelsky, sitting in the Russian baths:
“Relax? I got my wife’s relatives living at my house and you want me to relax?” Abelsky placed a cone on his head. “I don’t wanna sleep in other people’s houses and I don’t want other people to sleep in my house. I wanna walk around in my house in my underpants. Now I gotta wear pajamas: I don’t wanna wear pajamas. I don’t wanna put on the T-shirt. When I go to the bathroom, I wanna sit with my newspaper. What do I get? Somebody banging on the door, ‘I wanna shower.’ What the fuck do they wanna take a shower for? Let them take a shower in their house!” (142)
That definite article – “the T-shirt” – is really priceless. Unfortunately Abelsky barely gets to speak. Most of the book is taken up with the life of mechanized import-Manhattanite work-automatons, who, let us say, do not excite us either by their wisdom or their vitality. I will confess that I don’t know much about the life of people who pay $6000 a month in rent for a two-bedroom apartment, so I can hardly judge if O’Neill’s portrait is accurate, but it is certainly not appealing. It is certainly true that I feel a sympathy for the lie almost all of us are trained into, that work can provide a justification for existence that can persist in the face of the neglect of our emotional lives – that we can remain automatons (with a little entertainment to keep us going) without sacrificing our dignity and ultimately even our capacity for such work. But as far as story goes, you really need to see characters break through this problem in order to achieve any satisfactory result. I get the sense that O’Neill is aware of the problem, but not of any answers. The couple works; their marriage falls apart. The troubled marriage is mended, after a fashion; the reconciliation is not very inspiring:
“He’s [her lover] fucking someone else,” Rachel said.
“Good,” I said. “That means I can fuck you.”
She seemed to be searching for something in her coat pocket. “OK,” she said. (228)
Things like this may take place in my native city, but as far as my life goes, they may as well be happening in the Orion Nebula. (And I’m really not lying when I say that not much more development goes into the reconciliation; it is not entirely improbable, given the characters, but it is not at all satisfying). It is strange to me, sometimes, that this will be taken someday as a specimen of the relations between the sexes in my era; the world of Jane Austen or George Eliot or E.M. Forster, or even Milton or Shakespeare, seems much nearer to me than this.
O’Neill got much critical adoration for this work, and the praise of his prose style in particular has smitten the brazen heavens:
“full of vividly descriptive passages that possess a heightened, almost hallucinatory, brilliance” (The Observer)
“remarkable… Note-perfect.” (Vogue)
“O’Neill’s writing is unendingly beautiful.” (Los Angeles Times)
Presuming, as I do, that these reviewers are being honest, I have nothing to say about this except that I have no idea what they’re talking about. Aesthetic reaction is a phenomenon which justifies itself and requires no defense. But when I am told by USA Today (and by the way, I am treating these quotations as fair game because they are found in the pages of the book itself) that the book is “a beautifully written meditation on despair, loss, and exile,” I expect some John Ruskin-, or at least Evelyn Waugh-caliber prose. I have an older aesthetic, but what struck me about O’Neill’s writing is that it is almost never what I would call beautiful. It is often (often) insightful. It is tight: the sentences are brief and rarely contain words unnecessary to their meaning. But I often found myself remarking how O’Neill’s ideas could really be phrased much more eloquently:
Very little about anything seemed intelligible or certain, and New York itself – that ideal source of the metropolitan diversion that serves as a response to the largest futilities – took on a fearsome, monstrous nature whose reality might have befuddled Plato himself. (24)
Any number of artistic choices here – “ideal source,” “diversion” as opposed to “diversions,” “largest”, “Plato” (why Plato? Does he just mean “really smart dude”?) – seem questionable, though the concept of the cultural life in a metropolis being a mask for desperation is plausible enough.
This one made me laugh as an idea – very accurate – but I can’t praise the execution:
But apparently it is interesting to readers, and reassuring to certain traditionalists, that the Gowanus Canal can still turn up a murder victim. There’s death in the old girl yet, as one commentator wittily puts it. (6)
I’m one of these traditionalists, and I like this. But what I don’t see here is “a munificent, Rolex-calibrated beauty of Daedalian prose that brings to mind and mood F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby” (The Oregonian). But we admit our suspicion of any reviewer who uses the phrase “brings to mood.”
The Fitzgerald comparison is a meme I cannot fathom. Maybe it was suggested by the publisher and means something akin to “it’s good.” The saccharine, idealistic prose of Fitzgerald is utterly unlike O’Neill’s. It’s true there is one character who wants to make a lot of money, but he’s hardly Gatsby. But my incomprehension of the critics is brought to a head by the following, where I really cannot find any evidence of what the reviewer is saying in the evidence he produces:
In sustained passages of intense lyric beauty that more than squares any debt to Fitzgerald, O’Neill writes: ‘I wasn’t the only one of us to make out and accept an extraordinary promise in what we saw – the tall, approaching cape, a people risen in light. You only had to look at our faces.’ (The Irish Times)
Is the quoted passage really “intense lyric beauty”? Again, I concede to every man his right to an opinion, but I find this vague and awkward to the point of distracting unintelligibility, and illogical and bland to boot. Not to mention entirely unlike Fitzgerald.
Of course it is unjust to skewer a man with the dumb praise of his adulators. Let me bring in just one other reviewer comment because it is insightful:
O’Neill’s prose glows with what Alfred Kazin called “the marginal suggestiveness which in a great writer always indicates those unspoken reserves, that silent assessment of life, that can be heard below and beyond the slow marshaling of thought.” (The New York Times)
I think this is insightful because it is precisely false. There is an astonishing number of irrelevant passages in the book: a good example is the description of downtown Phoenix which emerges out of nowhere:
And so I went into a cactus-filled desert with three bald-headed buddies who each wore a complimentary conference baseball cap. On our way out we passed through downtown Phoenix. It was seemingly an uninhabited place given over to multilevel garages that, with their stacked lateral voids, almost duplicated the office blocks and their bands of tinted glass. The general vacancy was relieved by the slow and for some reason distinctly sinister movement of automobiles from street to street, as if these machines’ careful, orderly roaming was a charade whose purpose was to obscure the fact that the city had been forsaken. (216)
Needless to say, if the protagonist never goes to Arizona, or never passes through downtown Phoenix, nothing is removed from the book. It is utterly irrelevant. In the hands of a bad reviewer, this indicates “unspoken reserves”: “Oh, you see, he’s writing a book about New York, but he could just as easily write one about Phoenix, this guy is brilliant.” But the impression is that this author absolutely must deploy his marquee descriptions, even where they’re irrelevant, and has no reserves at all. The book has sentence discipline but not paragraph discipline or page discipline: much of the description seems to exist merely to get to a well-turned simile or metaphor, as if the author had nothing else to use, so he put in something irrelevant and called it a book about irrelevance. Fine, lovely. But it’s not old-fashioned aesthetic integritas and quite the opposite of “unspoken reserves.”
But O’Neill, in general, is a capable writer. And the book’s greatest value is its exploration of New York cricket culture (a major concern of the book) – those South Asians and West Indians who have taken over the old baseball fields in the Outer Boroughs, and seem easy enough to ignore because cricket seems so unapproachably tedious. The book inspired me to give it a look next time I see a game in progress. And I owe Mr. O’Neill a few smiles, thinking back on such events as the 2003 Blizzard, the 2003 Blackout or the Iraq War protests. We lived through all these things, and now people are writing books about them.
But have I been convinced to give up abstinence? In general, no; I am willing enough to experiment with these modern novels from time to time, but I am still looking for the writers I find as nourishing, as ambitious, as talented, and as profound as the Titans of other eras. I will end with one more example of this. There is a certain coarseness in these books that ultimately appals me. This is a conjugal scene. It is never counterbalanced by any kind of redeemed union:
And yet that night we reached for each other in the shuttered bedroom. Over the following weeks, our last as a family in New York, we had sex with a frequency that brought back our first year together, in London. This time round, however, we went about it with strangeness and no kissing, handling and licking and sucking and fucking with dispassion the series of cunts, dicks, assholes, and tits that assembled itself out of our successive yet miserably several encounters. Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time. (30)
Again, we know this misery exists; but does it make good art?
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