This, though it comes soon after my last plaint about a much-praised novel that I found, well, not praiseworthy, won't become a habit, I promise, because I'd much rather point to the good stuff than rag about the bad. But after reading Netherland by Joseph O'Neill I've got to make a point or two. O'Neill's writing is, as all aver, fine, sometimes stunning, especially in his mastery of metaphor, though it is also sometimes, to my taste, overwrought. Regardless, it's the story that demands comment. This tale too has to do with immigrants, in this case in New York City. This novel too involves an immigrant's efforts to succeed in business; in this case the character is a Trinidadian, Chuck Ramkissoon, who wheels and deals toward the dream of building a world-class cricket center on the site of the old Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn out by Jamaica Bay. This, the usual focus on ye olde entrepeneurial dream as the immigrant story, is annoying, not least because it is nowhere near representative of the real stories of the mass of Caribbean immigrants to New York, most of whom work jobs like home health aide, livery driver, nanny, hospital orderly and so on. Still, sure, plenty of folks do dream this dream and some do find the cash and connections to make a small start toward it. So the tired old emphasis on small-businesshood isn't what ultimately turned me off to Netherland.
The point of view is what did that. This novel may be in part about Chuck Ramkissoon, but it is about Chuck Ramkissoon as an odd, exotic type and his Brooklyn immigrant world as an odd, exotic setting as seen through the eyes of the narrator who is a wealthy white market analyst in the banking industry. This banker is an immigrant, too, but he's Dutch by way of London, and he's so well off that he travels to London every other weekend to see his child and estranged wife throughout most of the book. Other weekends he plays cricket with a crew of Caribbean, Asian, African and other immigrant New Yorkers. The sole white on his team, he is befriended by them and by Ramkissoon, and through them he travels into what is presented in the novel as the "other" New York. Which means Brooklyn. In a series of set pieces situated mostly in Flatbush -- a citywide cricket banquet, driving through various neighborhoods, the Russian baths (OK, that's Brighton Beach), etc. -- the reader is presented with a wealthy white Manhattanite's take on the lives lived by immigrants of color in Brooklyn. Oh god. Will there ever be an end to these books? These books that are full of good will and friendly and compassionate as hell, sure, but that are nevertheless essentially travelogues, neocolonial excursions into the world of the other by the central figure in history, according to himself, European man.
The author even catches himself at it. About two-thirds of the way through the book there's a passage where the narrator, Hans, is telling his wife about Chuck Ramkissoon and his wife accuses him of just this, exoticizing his supposed friend. Hmm, Hans thinks, all earnest, all reasonableness, am I doing that? And no, he earnestly concludes, no I'm not.
But yes the author is doing exactly that. He means well, no doubt, and he is it seems trying to get at several complexities about identity and immigration and friendship and history with the novel's title, but it strikes me that what he's cooked up is more like Neverland, one more postcolonial fantasy of what life is like for those driven across the world by the crimes of colonialism--as told by the inheritor of the riches stolen from their forebears. There's a liberal smugness to it, or at least that's how it sits with me.
Book after book of this ilk. Will we ever get to welcome book after book, published and marketed and widely reviewed, in which the stories of the workers and poor are presented directly by writers of the communities instead of as translated by outsiders?
