Netherland - Books (Joseph O'Neill, Hardcover)

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Customer Reviews of Netherland

bloodsimple
nottingham, uk
5th January 2009

Not understated, just overrated...
Oh dear. Another `important' book about 9/11. Another book with `aching prose' that is, allegedly, `poised and unsettling'. Or so the marketing blurb would have you believe. In fact, this is a dreadfully poor, under-edited work. I'm struggling to imagine the reader who would be satisfied by this book.

Let's get one thing clear: any attempt to link this book to issues about 9/11 are just commercial hype to get you to buy it. It has nothing to do with the Twin Towers - any attempt to connect it as such, is a retrospective attempt to shoehorn something contemporary into a dull, meandering read.

The narrator's stream-of-consciousness is no doubt deliberate, but it is tremendously annoying. The idea within an idea within an idea merely leaves everything elliptical, under-used, over-complicated, and robbed of any currency, wit, or impact. In fact, the absence of impact is one of the many flaws. The main character, Hans, is a drippy doormat who seems incapable of rousing himself to any kind of emotion at all. Wife leaving you? So what. Hate your job? Ho-hum. There is absolutely nothing that will gain this character's passionate attention, and therefore the reader's.

The basic idea of this book is appealing. Cricket in New York has a quirky ring to it. Quite why the additional quirk of a Dutchman playing it has been introduced, is hard to say. It smacks of O'Neill simply trying to squeeze all the things he knows about, into one novel. It doesn't work. There is not a love of the game flowing through the words - it is too carefully aimed at Americans who have never heard of the game. Hence, the cricket-as-metaphor idea falls flat on its face. It is perfectly possible to write about cricket and the characters who love it. But not if you're trying to explain the rules to the reader.

After 250 pages, you don't care what the ending is. There is no `big reveal', no satisfying outcome. Hans just stops gently whining. Nothing has hung together; nothing has resonated or given you pause for thought. This is an Emperor's New Clothes novel, which has somehow been marketed into a success, by implying that if you do not love it, you're intellectually unworthy of it.

Great American Novel? It's not even an average novel. I would prefer it if O'Neill had characters I could believe in (even if I hated them), an idea of where those characters are going, and the skill to evoke an era or place with any colour or depth.

Withnail67
UK
17th December 2008

A very important novel
It's hard to add much to the discussion of this book. It is something of a marmite novel, sharply dividing opioion. I go with those who feel it is one of the novels of the decade. I concur witrh the echoes of the Great Gatsby - for my money this novel seems more assured and coherent even than Fitzgerald.

I think this is the most restrained and effective depiction of the Anglo-American post-911 / post Iraq zeitgeist so far. I thnk the writing really offeres something new - while not 100% sucessful, I think the compromised and awkwardly triangulated narrator is about right for the age. The scene where he views the empty garden of his wife's London home on Google Earth sounds trite, but is haunting.

This is the novel McEwan's 'Saturday' aspired to be. Must read.

Sutho Gitanes
London
27th November 2008

Turgid Big American allegory
Even if it's not particularly long and the author is Irish, this feels a lot like a self-styled `Big American Novel' - the book is a rambling, outsiders' panorama of post-9/11 America with a symbolical narrative about (sort of) cricket. The main pull is O'Neill's highly lyrical writing style, which at times is quite evocative of John Banville - i.e. dazzlingly (self-consciously?) fancy/scholarly, and much easier to admire from a distance than feel genuine affection for.

Alba

15th November 2008

short and to the point
Brilliant, I thought. I've left it somewhere eye-catching on a bookshelf so I can read it again. I don't do that often.

Damian Patrick Kelly
Manchester UK
6th November 2008

Thankfully short
Netherland is incredibly evocative of what it must have been like living in New York in the period following the attacks on the World Trade Center. It also gives a strong feeling of dislocation, the sense of being an alien in a big city and of your wife and child leaving you to return to the other side of the world. This is all good stuff.

The style reminds me a little of Ballard but the great thing about Ballard is he cobines this style with a great story and big ideas. The story behind Netherland is terribly uninteresting and Hans' tedious philosophising about life doesn't really result in any insights worth bothering about.

The novel seems much longer than it is. Thankfully it is very short