Shadows

A client canceled a late afternoon phone call, and I might have been distressed (deadlines, I should have thought, promises), but the fact is that I was already comfortable in my overstuffed chair and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland was balanced enticingly within reaching distance. I didn't even have to stand up. I turned. Stretched. Fit the book in my hands. Found page 177. Plunged back into the story where I'd left it, a few days before. Utterly irresponsible, but there it is. I sat here and read a book of my own choosing. I dove beneath the radar.

I like this book. I am, in fact, amazed by long stretches of it—by how O'Neill, in this novel about displacement (I'll call it that; others have called it elsewise) slides all around the map of time, defusing the Big Questions early on so that readers never wonder what has happened; they only wonder why. The book is pure erudition. It's New York City post 9/11. It's cricket. It's The Chelsea Hotel. It's phantasmagoria and a marriage on the rocks. It's deep dives into stuff I knew not a single thing about. It's not easy, but neither are we human beings easy. We want to hold to the illusion that every life suggests a story, when in fact life is a jumble that works quite like the tumble and tangle of Netherland.

By the time I put the book down, there were three inches at least of new snow on the ground, and it was dark. I had dinner to cook, in other words, but I wanted to stay with Netherland a bit longer, and so I ambled over to Amazon to see what other readers had to say. My thinking being: I'll hang out in this little club of Netherlanders for a while before returning to real life. Some 76 reviewers had weighed in, and the book had four stars, and that was fine, it didn't much matter.

What impressed me, though, was the utter self-confidence of the naysayers. The certainty they shared that this book—acclaimed by so many, likened to The Great Gatsby by more than one—was, in a word, "bad." Bad. Boring and bad. Or pretentious and bad. Interesting combinations of bad. And I thought of how almost impossible it is to write well and how ready one must always be for those who will inevitably dismiss you.