Thursday, August 27, 2009

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

So the dirty little secret of the Jacob & Katy book club is that occasionally, we read books that are popular for timely reasons. Most of the time, we go out of our way to pick either unusual or uncommon books. But it doesn't always work out that way. We did Light in August around the same time Oprah picked it, and Infinite Jest right after David Foster Wallace died. Because when is Faulkner ever a bad idea? And if we weren't going to do Infinite Jest then, it never would have happened ("Infinite Summer" would have been waaaaaay out of the question). And this time around, President Obama just happened to endorse Netherland right after Jacob decided he wanted to read it. But despite the urge to ditch the choice as it gained popularity among the bookier Americans, it squeaked onto the short list for this round, and into the finals.

Netherland is a novel by Joseph O'Neill, set mostly in New York shortly after 9/11. Hans, a Dutchman by way of London (where he acquired a wife and a stable career in finance) moves to New York at the insistence of his wife. She freaks out and return to London shortly thereafter with their infant son and Hans's testicles firmly in hand. He flounders around in a sort of bleak comfort--he makes plenty of money at his Wall Street job, but can't really think of a way to spend it, except on an overpriced apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. The only thing that tethers him to--well, anything, really, is his love for cricket. He joins a weekly cricket game in Staten Island, populated by guys from India, the West Indies, and various other former British protectorates. There, he meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a gregarious Trinidadian dude who knows what he wants from life: sex, money, and a world-class cricket stadium in Brooklyn.

While dealing with his various losses (his mother, his sweetly ordinary Dutch childhood, his wife and kid), Hans lets Chuck pull him into his orbit. This involves a lot of random-ish errands out to Brooklyn, where Chuck describes (in increasingly alarming detail) his plans to finance a cricket mecca in East Flatbush. It becomes clear that Chuck is doing some seriously shady stuff to finance his dream: iffy Russian friends, a gambling ring among local West Indians, schmoozing hazy international donors. Hans is both curious enough to go along for the ride, and bored enough to disregard any potential illegality on his own part. He idolizes Chuck a little without sentimentalizing him--both men, as modern immigrants to the country, are seeking the American prize, whatever that might be. For Chuck, it's American capitalism with an extra helping of jingoism. For Hans, it's owning the potential for freedom--his obsession becomes getting a driver's license and buying a car, even though a) no one needs a car in NYC; and 2) he seems to have no plans to go anywhere outside the metro area. But they're both looking for a piece of the action, and appear to respect that in one another. That they both love a sport that 99.9% of the American population couldn't care less about, that's just cake.

As Hans starts pulling his own life together, he starts to have less use for Chuck--and the way O'Neill juxtaposes their trajectories is interesting. In a review blurb, NY Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani suggests that there are "echoes of the Great Gatsby." And I can see that (though my partner in bookish crime begged to differ). There's a similar sense of melancholy over both books, and Chuck is a bit of a Gatsby--the faux-naive, cheerfully sociopathic part, anyway. Both novels are about finding the sacred in American life.

I also really enjoyed O'Neill's writing. At times he's a little too sentimental, but that may have been just a function of his mopey, nostalgic narrator. I liked the complex, streaming language:

"I came to step around in a murk of my own making, and to be drifted away from my native place, and in due course to rely on Rachel as a human flashlight.... To give an example, she was the one, all those years ago, who brought cinema and food to my attention. Undoubtedly I had already watched movies and eaten lunch; but I hadn't located them in the so-called scheme of things."

"I was taken by lightheaded yearning for an interlude of togetherness, a time-out, as it were, during which my still-wife and I might lie together in a Four Seasons suite, say, and work idly through a complimentary fruit basket and fuck at leisure and, most important, have hours-long, disinterested, beans-spilling, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may conversations in which we'd examine each other's unknown nooks and crannies in the best of humor and faith."

"...I began to dream in all seriousness of a stadium, and black and brown and even a few white faces crowded in bleachers, and Chuck and me laughing over drinks in the members' enclosure and waving to people we know, and stiff flags on the pavilion roof, and fresh white sight-screens, and the captains in blazers looking up at a quarter spinning in the air, and a stadium-wide flutter of expectancy as the two umpires walk onto the turf square and its omelette-colored batting track, whereupon, with clouds scrambling in from the west, there is a roar as the cricket stars trot down the pavilion steps onto this impossible field in America, and everything is suddenly clear, and I am at last naturalized."

So popularity aside, this was a book chosen in good taste, and I'm glad to have read it.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Prague by Arthur Phillips

Ah, to be young, American, and idealistic in...Budapest. Wait. Is that right? Probably not. Anyway, that's the basic premise of Arthur Phillips's novel Prague. (You might think said novel would take place in the titular city, but you'd be wrong.)

The book follows five young expats in Budapest in the early 90s, right after the Velvet Revolution, and right before Czech shed Oslovakia. There's Mark, a Canadian grad student who devotes every minute of his existence to studying nostalgia. It's every bit as circular as you might think. There's Emily, a somewhat bland midwesterner indulging an Electra complex by working as an American embassy assistant to impress her civil servant father. There's Charles, a Hungarian-American who shifts between the cultures according to whichever one he disdains less at the moment. And then there are the Californian brothers, Scott and John--one of whom has a love-hate relationship with his brother, while the other has a hate-hate one. John, who follows Scott to Prague for foolishly optimistic bonding reasons, becomes the ostensible protagonist of the book 'cause he's young, and can talk earnestly about how the MTV generation coming of age in the late 80s is going to fix everything. The five are friends more or less due to proximity and shared American-ness, but become entangled despite always seeming annoyed with one another. They do share, however, the nagging feeling that everything would be more interesting if only they were living in Prague instead.

The novel follows them (particularly John) as they move throughout Budapest, glib and hopelessly American despite their deepening interactions with the locals. It's kind of like a slightly downer L'Auberge Espagnole. Phillips does a good job of contrasting the promise of a new Hungarian culture (McDonalds! American t-shirts!) in 1990 with the gray, lingering vestiges of Communist-era thinking. The twentysomething characters become involved with old guard figures, like a septaugenarian lounge singer with crazy war stories to spare, and Horvath, the heir of a Hungarian publisher whose fortunes fluctuated with the country's.

Phillips devotes almost half of the book to the story of that press (the Horvath Kiado), and Horvath's eventual ruin at the hands of one of the young protagonists. I think this was a risky choice--I found the movement back and forth from the history to the present too jarring. The structure of the book was my biggest issue with it. Also, probably due to being a first-time novelist at the time, Phillips seemed unsure of what to do with the characters past a certain point, letting them devolve into soapy plots and odd endings.

I did like the overall Phillips style, though, and am willing to forgive a lot in a first novel.

Parts I liked especially:

"Whatever safety precautions Mark Payton had taken in graduate school while clinically investigating the toxins of nostalgia, they had been insufficient."

"Of course, vegetarian cooking was elusive, and the air quality left a lot to be desired, but the city was good-looking, and you could breathe fine if you stayed in shape, avoided hostility and fat, ate three garlic cloves each morning, absorbed plenty of antioxidants, avoided yeast bread within three hours of a scheduled elimination, lived up in the Buda hills, and avoided rigidity in your attitudes."

"As the band tuned up underneath the blue sky, white clouds, and long-gone heroes, the saxophonist introduced the first number, " 'Beatrice,' a lovely tune written by the saxman Sam Rivers for his wife."
Nadja listened in silence for seveal minutes. 'It is a pretty tune, no? And a time-honored tradition, I think: Write something pretty, name it for your wife or lover, and vow it will make her immortal. A familiar lie, yes? You men all do that, John Price."

"In business school, you know, the phrase had a distinct meaning. 'I'm going into publishing' meant something very specific. Like when you came out of an exam and someone asked you how you did and you knew you blew it, you just said, 'It looks like I'm going into publishing.' Or someone gets nailed with a professor's question on a case study, unprepared, and they fumble it, you can hear other students in the class singsonging: 'Looks like somoene's going into publishing!'"

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Dancing About Architecture

So I haven't yet gotten around to writing up Arthur Phillips' Prague (the next book club book may have come and gone by then--eep!), but in the meantime I should share an article that MTL passed along: Dancing About Architecture. In it, Phillips muses about how to approach music through writing.

I like his points about the risks of inserting music into narrative, particularly the idea that "the author is betting on a shared musical vocabulary, an occasionally dangerous wager." It gets a little too meta at times, but he does it charmingly enough. I'm looking forward to checking out The Song is You.

He also uses the old saying, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." For the record, I would like to note that Dancing About Architecture was the working title of the movie Playing By Heart, which features some of Jon Stewart's finest acting this side of Death to Smoochy. (Okay, so it's actually a very cute, very 90s little romantic comedy. And you're not gonna see Stewart making out like that with, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin on The Daily Show, so I recommend checking it out for the novelty factor.)

Sunday, August 09, 2009

Reader-in-Chief

So yesterday I bought a copy of Netherland by Joseph O'Neill at Borders. On it was a big red sticker proclaiming President Obama's adoration for the novel. (For the record, I'm not reading it because he did--but Jacob, if you're reading this, I think we should use this as an opportunity to invite Mr. Obama to join the book club. B&J&K book club has a nice ring to it.)

Anyway, I found the sticker interesting, because this is an issue we've been discussing lately at work. How do you take public, glowing praise from the president and use it to sell the heck out of your product? It's a fairly exclusive marketing opportunity--and the rewards can be great. Just ask J. Crew and any Portuguese Water Dog.

But at the same time, you can't just slap a sitting president's name on something as an endorsement. Random House ducks this neatly by blurbing an Obama soundbite from Newsweek about the book. The only thing missing is, "But you don't have to take my word for it!" Way to use the liberal media to do your dirty work, Random House. The system works.