‘Netherland’ is an ambiguous word. It evokes, of course, the Netherlands inhabited by the Dutch, one of whom, Hans van den Broek, tells this story of a few late years spent in that New World city founded almost four hundred years ago on Manhattan Island as New Amsterdam, in what was then the territory of New Netherland. But ‘netherland’ could also mean any faraway place, as in those ‘nether regions’ of the city where Hans’s teammates from the Staten Island Cricket Club spend their nights. (Hans spends his nights in Chelsea, a Manhattan neighbourhood hardly described in this book, notable for a high concentration of well-built gay men, new condominiums, art galleries, bank branches and large home-furnishing outlets.) ‘Netherland’ also has sinister overtones of Never Never Land, and sounds like a euphemism for Hades.
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Without question, Netherland is the product of real intelligence and design, and an unusually well-written book at that, even if the prose shows more belletristic expertise than it does the features of a true individual style. Ultimately, the issue of the novel’s quality, its success, will probably be resolved by something else: namely, by whether the reader considers such things as the novel’s disconnection between cricket and life, the superior reality it confers on more ‘colourful’ people, and the uncomprehended quality of Hans’s work and marriage, to be, above all, formal traits to do with O’Neill’s novel, or psychological traits to do with Hans’s special case. Not that it is ever easy to decide, when it comes to first-person or confessional novels, whether the narrator’s style is a formal matter first, or a psychological one. Does the blank prose of L’Etranger summon the affectless Meursault, or is it the other way around? Does Humbert Humbert’s nympholepsy naturally produce such a fancy prose style, or is it instead that his lust for Lolita furnishes Nabokov’s only means of rendering psychologically plausible and important the mood of sinister exquisitism that he, Nabokov, prefers to adopt? In these happy instances, the question is undecidably chicken-and-egg. The question of priority – style or man? – is moot.
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Benjamin Kunkel’s first novel, Indecision, came out in 2005. He is an editor of n+1, and is at work on a play.
