Netherland

Anybody finished with Netherland yet? I may be the only one but I didn't love it, so I kind of want to do my post on it and move on.

{warning- spoilers}
I thought O'Neill was a fascinating writer. But the main character, Hans, was completely unmotivating and unmotivated. He drove me crazy. I did like hearing about his relationships with people in his life, and stories of his youth, those were my favorite parts of the book. However, then I felt even more annoyed that he so easily let the important things slip out of his life. Even his effort at restoring his family in the end seemed subpar. Chuck was obviously shady and I don't understand how Hans was so naive to it until the end. Was his distractedness and lack of passion a result of 9/11? A result of being a foreigner in Manhattan? Hans seemed like a ghost floating through the city and life and doing what others told him to do (Rachel and Chuck, primarily). I would have thought experiencing something like that would make one cling to and fight for loved ones more dearly.

A few passages I marked. necause they way they described certain moments in relationships was so very real to me:
"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." (pg 89)

"For my comings and goings were frightening mysteries to my three-year-old son. My arrival, however closely anticipated, startled him; and from our first moment together he would be filled with a dread of my departure, which he could not comprehend of situate in time. He feared that any minute I might be gone; and always the thing he most feared would come to pass." (pg 118)

"But in the taxi home, there's an epilogue of sorts: my wife, mooning out of the window at rainy Regent's Park, says, "God do you remember those sirens?" and still, looking away, she reaches for my hand and squeezes it.
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." (pg 183)