Tom Swift Writer’s Notebook

It’s not the plot. Set in the days, months and years following 9/11, Netherland is the story of a man whose wife leaves him (eventually they reconcile for reasons that do not inspire) and whose friend is murdered. There’s also a lot of cricket.

It’s not the characters. Hans, the narrator, is from Holland by way of England, a middle-30s man who makes a comfortable living but does not exude much passion for his work or much curiosity about the world outside his sphere of influence. Oh, and he plays a lot of cricket. Hans’ wife is educated and successful, but largely unappealing. Hans’ friend, Chuck, manufactures grandiose ideas — when he’s not engaged in shady dealings.

By the way, I didn’t just spoil anything; readers learn all of this at the top. So it’s not the suspense, either.

Why do I love Joseph O’Neill’s new novel and why do I recommend it with much enthusiasm? The sentences. O’Neill is simply a sensational sentence maker. A handful of samples that jumped out during my reading:

• “Perhaps the relevant truth — and it’s one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I am sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me — is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.”
• “And after Mama’s cremation I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one’s dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead.”
• “She merely wiped the floor with paper towels and said nothing, brushing her free hand against my shoulder blade — my shoulder blade! — as she carried the soaked paper to the trash can, never holding me fast, refraining not out of lack of humanity but out of fear of being drawn into a request for further tenderness, a request that could only bring her face-to-face with some central revulsion, a revulsion of her husband or herself or both, a revulsion that had come from nowhere, or from her, or perhaps from something I’d done or failed to do, who knew, she didn’t want to know, it was too great a disappointment, far better to get on with the chores, with the baby, with the work, far better to leave me to my own devices, as they say, to leave me to resign myself to certain motifs, to leave me to disappear guiltily into a hole of my own digging.”
• “He was fat, and yet great folds of excess skin wilted from his stomach and back and limbs. He looked unstuffed, an abandoned work of taxidermy.”
• “Strange, how such a moment grows in value over a marriage’s course. We gratefully pocket each of them, these sidewalk pennies, and run with them to the bank as if creditors were banging on the door. Which they are, one comes to realize.”

This post was added on Sunday, August 03, 2008 by Tom Swift at 01:10 and is filed under Reading Material.