I know Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland came out like a month and a half back—and the review just a bit down, of the recent Willie Nelson bio, is at least a month late, too—but I just didn’t have time. I also, for selfish/stupid/misguided reasons, decided after reading Wood’s review in the New Yorker that I didn’t, in fact, want to read Netherland. (Idle Q: does anyone else have reviewers that they automatically disagree with, as a stupid, knee-jerk, idiotic reaction? If John Leonard or Louis Menand likes a book, I’ll do anything to make time for it; if Wood or Updike likes it, I get nervous or back off…all of which is stupid and something I need to get better about rapidly.) I came around at the urging of a reliable friend who said he was going to read it, and I figured I wanted to at least be able to talk with him about it, and so into Netherland I went.

In Wood’s New Yorker review, he writes at one point that O’Neill gets “extremely subtle,” and though Wood was using the phrase to describe only one fraction of the book, I couldn’t help but think, while reading it, that the whole book is, by and large, extremely subtle. The basics are pretty straightforward: Hans, a financial analyst (working, specifically, on oil futures and the like), and his wife Rachel, move to New York from London shortly before 9/11 and then, after the attacks, Rachel and their son move back to London, forcing Hans into a few-year stretch of living at the Chelsea Hotel, working steadily, and befriending an entrepreneur from Trinidad named Chuck Ramkissoon. From the outset of the novel the reader knows Chuck’s fate: he’ll be found dead, once Hans has left New York and reunited with his wife and child in London, in the Gowanus Canal with his hands bound. He’ll have died not too long after Hans left the states.

The central point of both Chuck’s and Hans’ friendship and the book itself is cricket, a game Hans played in his childhood and a game for which Chuck could very modestly be described as a huge booster. The sport functions thematically in the book as something like the classic pot in which Americans can melt together into a unified, colorful whole. Chuck, full of grand plans and lofty speeches and touched with more than a little deviousness (he does, after all, start the book dead, and though the reasons for his demise are never made overtly clear—no killer fingered and trial begun or anything—it’s pretty obvious that he was killed for below-the-table business transactions), spend the whole novel working to make cricket a transformational experience for America. It is, he declares, the first true American sport, noting that Ben Franklin was a cricket man.

The extreme subtlety of the book demands that the reader impose/bundle Chuck’s notions of cricket-as-transformational-experience and 9/11 and Hans’ necessary personal growth (he’s Dutch and casual and sort of cold and distant in ways that feel greatly real), and though I don’t think I really got everything of the book (there’s a great, great review by John Self at his blog Asylum which articulates many points more clearly than I could), the book’s so freakishly well written it’s hard for me to find much to argue with. It’s not simply that O’Neill writes beautiful sentences—he does, he does; it’s that the book’s structure is so incredibly soft, so intuitive, it’s almost hard to believe. Time is so fluid in this book that it might frustrate some readers who want a Monday-then-Tuesday-then-Wednesday-type narrative: no such dice in these pages. Instead, the book is a spookily seductive book in ways that are baffling and, to some degree, infuriating: I can’t really say exactly what all ‘happens’ through the book (aside from major points), or what it all ‘means’ or whatever. I will say, though, that the attention it’s getting seems pretty worth it, and that I’ll be glad to read it again in a few months, and that I can’t imagine how this isn’t a book that’ll keep well on any shelf and pay huge dividends to the close, careful reader.

 

Joe Patoski’s Willie Nelson is, for my money, one of those perfect biographies that enriches your understanding of a complex person while subtracting nothing from the subject. I am totally a sucker for happy endings and it makes me sad to read about artists I’ve adored and find that I’ve been adoring, well, a dick. Willie Nelson comes across in Patoski’s account as a deeply, wonderfully human character—someone who spent early years selling himself at radio stations and whooping it up with friends at bars and honky tonks; someone who has grown steadily, as an artist and as a person, throughout his years. I’m sure Willie Nelson’s got skeletons in his closet and that there are, of course, shadows over parts of his life. That said, he seems, to this reader and listener, an incredibly American icon—not simply an American Icon (meaning we can all recognize his red braids and big grin and we know about the tax evasion and pot smoking and etc), but that he’s a self-made man who was loyal to many and unfair to few and has charted an interesting and successful life by dint of hard work and imagination.

Patoski’s style, too, is about as pure as it gets: he neither tried to recreate situations with a pretension to get into the heads of the characters involved nor does he stuff each scene with long rambling recollections. The scenes move so quick and deft that I was on like page 150 before I even realized it. I don’t know how many huge, thick, heavy-duty biographies are coming out this year, but this has to be near the top of the list both in terms of interesting subject and great writing.