Netherland Part 1

"It was possible, too, I further speculated, that a father might have done the trick – that is, an active, observable predecessor in experience, one moreover alert to the duty of handing down, whether by example or word of mouth, certain encouragements and caveats; and even now, when I am beginning to understand the limits of the personal advice business, I am led to consider, especially when I stroll in Highbury Fields with Jake, a skateboarding boy of six these days, what I might one day transmit to my son to ensure that he does not grow up like his father, which is to say, without warning." Have a look at this. It's a 106 word sentence. I think it might be the longest one in the book but I selected it almost randomly when I was reading page 87 of Netherland and started to think about Joseph O'Neill's prose.

It has divided people that I know, one woman saying that it the next Gatsby ( and there could be no higher praise than this from her) and another saying that she really disliked it. I look forward to going to bed with Mr O'Neill. I love his character Hans and I think he is deliberately using this very careful circuitous Henry James type prose to set up Hans as a real Dutchman. It may be stereotypical but it works for me. He is a man to whom things happen, perhaps because he is bogged down by semi-colons, dashes, and colons. Actually not colons - no lists, just a lot of phrases that imply a certain predisposition.

On the weekend I also saw a film about a scenario which is the opposite of the one which Hans finds himself in. The film is Margot at the Wedding. Margot is the fraying at the edges older sister who comes to"celebrate" her sister's wedding. At one stage her sister says to her "Margot, when your sense of self hinges on your fuckability and that begins to wane, it's very hard." Margot is having a slightly ungrounded affair with a guy who is pretty horrible. Its a great statement and sort of made the film for me though I liked a lot about it. I also liked watching the interview with the director. He talked about how the film has almost no establishing shots so we are pivoted right into the uncomfortable family situation without much warning. Its a really effective idea. A lot of the action is seen indirectly or a characters head is cut off and we just see his or her body moving round the room like you are sitting on the couch or something. It works in such a different way to Netherland where a lot of the time we live in Hans' head.