The American Century: Literature since 1945 805set during the intervention of the United States in Vietnam, uses the psychological
operation referred to in its title (an operation that might or might not be either real
or officially sanctioned) to interrogate the “crazy circus” of conflict. It is about
America again being deterritorialized, but this time by being situated in the context
of an American war fought on foreign soil. All these novels could be described as
realistic, thanks to their attention to the empirical details of a particular society and
individual psychology. To describe them in this way, however, is to say what is probably
the least interesting thing about them. So it is with Netherland, which has at its center
a character called Hans van den Broek, a Dutch banker married to an English lawyer,
whose marriage starts to collapse when the destruction of the World Trade Center
drives him, his wife, and his son Jake out of their Tribeca apartment and into the
polyglot, bohemian refuge of the Chelsea Hotel. Soon after the family relocate, a trial
separation occurs. Hans’s wife, enraged by the policies of the Bush administration
and unhappy with what she sees as the strange lassitude of her husband, departs with
her son to London. Left alone now, Hans is afloat, a dangling man, wandering in a
state of disconnection through the streets of New York.
What Hans encounters during his wandering constitutes the other strand of the
narrative. That strand introduces us to a postcolonial variation on the American
dreamer. It also introduces Hans himself to a world that, safely ensconced in the
comfortable milieu of international finance, he has hardly ever encountered or
known. Hans meets and befriends a mysterious, charismatic figure called Chuck
Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian of South Asian descent, an ambitious entrepreneur and
a small-time gangster. Through Chuck, whose eventual unexplained and violent
death provides the catalyst for Hans’s story, O’Neill maps the heterogeneous territory
of New York City – not only the affluent neighborhoods but the “outer boroughs” of
Queens, Staten Island, and what Chuck calls “the real Brooklyn.” Chuck’s story,
which he tells Hans, is in many ways reminiscent of the story of that paradigm of the
American dream, Jay Gatsby. His motto, “think fantastic,” suggests this. Unlike
Gatsby, though, this story of success takes place on a fully globalized terrain. “It’s a
people business,” Chuck declares of his life as a property developer, “I ran a team of
Bangladeshi cement guys. I had Irish painters – well, the main guy was Irish ... his
men were Guatemalans. I had Russian plasterers, I had Italian roofers, I had Grenadan
carpenters.” Hans travels with Chuck to the outer boroughs, on drives that seem to
go on forever. These, as it turns out, not only make the banker an unwitting accessory
to Chuck’s shady business deals and his involvement in illicit gambling, they also
draw the attention of Hans, and the reader, to the New York of immigration and
more generally to United States as a site of multiple ethnic and cultural encounters;
we are, in effect, invited to attend to a world that exists beyond the simplistic
oppositions of nationalist rhetoric. This is a hybrid, heterogeneous space that resists
the discourse of “us-versus-them” on which the verbal currency of terrorism and
counterterrorism depends. This is a very different kind of immigrant encounter
from the one mapped in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. But, like Hamid’s book,
O’Neill’s invites us to inspect the liminal spaces that exist beyond any boundary laid
down by the linear narrative of nation.GGray_c05.indd 805ray_c 05 .indd 805 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM