Netherland.

Tap, tap. Anyone still there??

Guess what? I just finished Netherland.

Except I didn't really read it. I mean, I sort of did, but I guess I kind of skimmed it after a while. So I guess I can't really get credit for reading it.

I read the first 75 pages or so & decided that I didn't love it. Or maybe even like it. I mean, O'Neill is clearly a strong writer. Obviously. But I was having a bad week, & I didn't really have the tolerance / patience to finish something I didn't really love in that very moment, so I skimmed through & grabbed the major plot points, probably missing out on the essential parts of the book in the process.

But I like what Heidi & Lindsey said about it. Especially what Heidi said about Hans feeling like a ghost. Exactly. The whole book just felt so grey & blasé.

I was just frustrated, I guess. Frustrated at how their relationship unraveled, so seemingly apathetically. How does that happen? I never want it to happen to me & my own. It makes my stomach hurt to think about it.

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What should we read next? Let's pick up again, yes? My mom is loving The Help right now, but I'm just sort of feeling out of in in terms of books to read. I feel like it's been a bad reading year for me & I want to change that.

Maybe we should look at the original list we did a year ago?

Netherland: Thoughts on Hans

I was just flipping through Netherland and wanted to share a couple things that I had marked.

I think this is what makes me sympathetic to Hans...

p.82-83 "Perhaps the relevant truth--and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me--is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble."

I loved his description of the DMV on the following page (which is so true!)...

p 85 "Two of the, women in their thirties, screamed with laughter by a photocopying machine, but as soon as they reached their positions at the counter they wore faces of sullen hostility. One could understand why, for assembled before them was a perpetually reinforced enemy, its troops massing relentlessly on the hard pew-like benches. Many of those seated were hunched forward with hands clasped and heads bowed, raising their eyes only to follow the stupendous figures..."

And then there was a line I really loved, but I can't find the paper I wrote it on... Hm. I'll be back.

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)