Beyond a Boundary

The simplicity of the writing here and the choosing of a frozen racial emblem echo V. S. Naipaul, that Trinidadian Indian, and, if “Netherland” pays homage to “The Great Gatsby,” it is also in some kind of knowing relationship with “A House for Mr. Biswas.” These are large interlocutors, but “Netherland” has an ideological intricacy, a deep human wisdom, and prose grand enough to dare the comparison. Less desperately than Biswas, less comically, too, Chuck is searching for a house, a home, and so is Hans, adrift in a New York at once fascinating and a little estranging. O’Neill has Naipaul’s gift for creating unforced novelistic connections in a world of forced ideological connections. And he knows perfectly well that when, on the last pages of his novel, he writes about a memory of Manhattan’s skyline and the “extraordinary promise in what we saw” he is hovering, like some novelistic Google Earther, over the sentence grids and prose plateaus of the last page of “The Great Gatsby.” He knows, as some of us had forgotten, that the last page of that novel contains not just a green breast and a blue lawn but an old island that flowered once “for Dutch sailors’ eyes.”
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fineleg , is this you ??  hope the novel sells a few  :-[