11/29

Getting Lost and Found in the Underworld of Memory

Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland is a vision of one man’s New York as personal purgatory and site of redemption. Billed alternately as a postcolonial tale, a post-9/11 meditation and a New York epic in the vein of Paul Auster, Netherland would be a fine example of any of these subgenres but ends up an accomplished work on its own terms. Few recent books depict the rambling disorder of memory and the raging desolation of post-traumatic malaise with such vividness. Netherland manages both through the clarity of its narrative, illustrated in detailed strokes with potent metaphor and emotion.

O’Neill does not attempt to write a book from every New Yorker’s perspective. It’s obvious that Hans van den Broek, the Dutch banker whose thoughts give Netherland its voice, shares many life experiences with O’Neill, who also came of age in The Hague and England before ending up in New York’s Chelsea Hotel. It’s a strange decision at first to write an immigrant narrative from the perspective of a wealthy European banker, one who surely does not represent the average immigrant in New York City. But the book benefits from this deeply specific angle, taking on an authenticity that might have been impossible without the slow pile-up of so many personal details. The narrative follows Hans’s memory, which wanders into and out of nonlinear anecdotes, visual ephemera and poetic impressions following the thinnest of connective threads. A typical example of Han’s mode of thinking goes something like this:
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