Now available in paperback
Benjamin Kunkel writes:
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.
(LRB 17 July 2008)
Fourth Estate | hardback
247 pp. |ISBN:
9780007269068
