The Ashes

There have been good novels about living in the post-9/11 world (Ian McEwan’s “Saturday”), pretentious ones (Don DeLillo’s “Falling Man”) and sentimental ones (Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”). But sorting through the pile of so-called 9/11 novels is a sad exercise, one that grows more pointless by the day. They’re all 9/11 novels now.

It’s impossible, though, to stop scanning the horizon for something else — the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror.

Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland” is not that novel. It’s too urbane, too small-boned, too savvy to carry much Dreiserian sweep and swagger. But here’s what “Netherland” surely is: the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell. On a micro level, it’s about a couple and their young son living in Lower Manhattan when the planes hit, and about the event’s rippling emotional aftermath in their lives. On a macro level, it’s about nearly everything: family, politics, identity. I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn’t know I had.

O’Neill, who was born in Ireland, raised in Holland and now lives in New York, seems incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought, whether he’s writing about dating (“We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically”) or the darker stuff that keeps us awake at night, like the nuclear plant just up the river (“Indian Point: the earliest, most incurable apprehensions stirred in its very name”).

O’Neill’s prose glows with what Alfred Kazin called “the marginal suggestiveness which in a great writer always indicates those unspoken reserves, that silent assessment of life, that can be heard below and beyond the slow marshaling of thought.” And O’Neill knows how to deploy the quotidian fripperies of our laptop culture to devastating fictional effect. There’s a moment in “Netherland” involving a father, the son who has been taken from him, and Google Earth that’s among the most moving set pieces I’ve read in a recent novel. The father hovers over his son’s house nightly, “flying on Google’s satellite function,” lingering over his child’s dormer window and blue inflated swimming pool, searching the “depthless” pixels for anything, from thousands of miles away, he can cling to. O’Neill’s novel is full of moments like this: closely observed, emotionally racking, un-self-consciously in touch with how we live now.

The plot in “Netherland” runs on two tracks. The first tells the story of a family. The narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a Dutch-born equities analyst (he compares himself, in terms of influence if not infamy, to Henry Blodget) who lives in a TriBeCa loft with his British-born wife, Rachel, and their son. When 9/11 forces them to flee farther uptown, they end up living, almost by accident, in the shabby-glamorous Chelsea Hotel, and it is there that their marriage slowly cracks apart.

Rachel wants to take their son back to London and her family. He’ll be safer there, far from George Bush and the United States, a country she has begun to think of as “ideologically diseased.” Hans, unsure of his feelings, starts to believe he is “a political-ethical idiot.” O’Neill writes beautifully about what it sometimes felt like in the months after 9/11, when you couldn’t attend a dinner party unless you were intellectually armed for hours of bitter debate: “For those under the age of 45 it seemed that world events had finally contrived a meaningful test of their capacity for conscientious political thought. Many of my acquaintances, I realized, had passed the last decade or two in a state of intellectual and psychic yearning for such a moment — or, if they hadn’t, were able to quickly assemble an expert arguer’s arsenal of thrusts and statistics and ripostes and gambits and examples and salient facts and rhetorical maneuvers. I, however, was almost completely caught out.”

What Hans and Rachel are trying to avoid, he tells us, is “what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the ’30s or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the cold war inhabitants of New York, London, Washington and, for that matter, Moscow.” It doesn’t matter. Rachel and their son are soon gone, while Hans stays behind in New York.

The book’s second story line, and perhaps its more resonant one, is about the solace Hans finds in the vibrant subculture of cricket in New York, where he is among the few white men to be found on the hundreds of largely West Indian teams in the city, teams that fan out, in the hazy summertime, across scrabby, lesser-known public parks.

O’Neill seems to know all there is to know about this sport. He writes about it with casual grace, describing, for example, the cricket batsman’s array of potential strokes: “the glance, the hook, the cut, the sweep, the cover drive, the pull and all those other offspring of technique conceived to send the cricket ball rolling and rolling, as if by magic, to the far-off edge of the playing field.”

The cricket these men play is, they realize, not quite the game they fell in love with back in the Antilles. The New York fields are too small, and not well tended. Here is more of O’Neill’s lovely writing about the game: “This degenerate version of the sport — bush cricket, as Chuck more than once dismissed it — inflicts an injury that is aesthetic as much as anything: the American adaptation is devoid of the beauty of cricket played on a lawn of appropriate dimensions, where the white-clad ring of infielders, swanning figures on the vast oval, again and again converge in unison toward the batsman and again and again scatter back to their starting points, a repetition of pulmonary rhythm, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors.”

O’Neill cracks open a teeming world on the fringes of Manhattan, and through it we witness the aspirations of countless men who otherwise are invisible to wealthy Manhattanites. (“You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country?” one character asks. “Put on the white clothes of the cricketer. Put on white to feel black.”)

Hans’s guide through this alternative city is Chuck Ramkissoon, a talky, street-smart Trinidadian who is alive in ways Hans is not. Some of Chuck’s business practices are shady (he runs an old-world “weh weh” gambling ring and intimidates his rivals), but he’s a Gatsby-like American dreamer as well, a man who hopes to build a world-class cricket arena in Brooklyn.

Chuck wants to make a killing on his cricket center, but he also has bigger ambitions: he essentially wants to save the world. “All people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket,” he explains. “What’s the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle. ... I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. With the New York Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in U.S. history. Why not?”

Some of the best parts of “Netherland” are Chuck’s rambling political and cultural monologues, delivered as Hans drives him around the boroughs. (Ostensibly, Chuck is helping Hans prepare for his driving test. Unwittingly, Hans is Chuck’s chauffeur, shuttling him to some of his least tasteful business dealings.) The book’s few lesser moments occur at the Chelsea Hotel, where a cast of eccentrics — including a man who wears angel’s wings and a wedding dress — are asked to carry cheap metaphorical freight.

Chuck’s vast cricket plans don’t pan out, and he vanishes under murky and ultimately grisly circumstances. Did he kill himself? one friend asks. Another responds: “You idiot! Chuck isn’t a suicide guy! This guy has more life inside him than 10 people!”

“Netherland” is a bit like the wily and ebullient Chuck Ramkissoon. It has more life inside it than 10 very good novels.

骨灰——Netherland《荷兰》书评（纽约时报）

      有很多关于9.11后的伤痕文学小说杰作（伊恩·麦克尤恩的《星期六》），有狂妄式的（德里罗的《坠楼者》），也有伤感的（约那瀚·桑弗兰·弗尔的《极度的喧嚣与异样的紧密》）。但是通观所有被叫做9.11式的小说真是让人失望，它们越来越不知所云，现在竟然也都成为了9.11式小说。

     话虽如此，但我们不能否定同一范围的其他小说，那些令人振奋，具有宽视野、多角度的小说，这种小说具有毋庸置疑的高智商，并为新式恐怖写下新篇章。

     约瑟夫·奥尼尔的《荷兰》并不是那种小说。它太温文尔雅，结构太小，太精明，但世贸中心倒塌后在纽约和伦敦我读过的关于生活的最风趣，最愤怒，最严肃，最凄凉的小说非《荷兰》莫属。在微观上，它讲述的是当飞机撞毁时一对夫妻与他们的儿子生活在下曼哈顿，以及惨剧带给他们的生活上的涟漪。宏观上，在家庭，政治，身份方面无所不包。我如饥似渴的三气就把它读完了，它满足了我从来都不知道的内心的欲望。

     生于爱尔兰，长于荷兰，现在生活在纽约的奥尼尔似乎写不出哪怕是一个乏味的句子，也没有任何无聊的想法。他是在写浪漫的约会（“这种手法我们更喜欢用英语中的‘醉酒效应’来描述”），还是在写沉重的让我们无法入眠的事情，就像就在河上游的那个核电站（“印第安角¹：最早的，也是最无可救药的恐惧，提起它的名字就让人战栗”）？

 奥尼尔的散文随处可见艾尔弗雷德·卡津所说的“伏笔”，这是指“伟大的作家经常会在沉默地叙述生活时买下伏笔，而在后面则有意想不到的呼应”。奥尼尔知道怎样部署平常的虚饰以彻底摧毁虚构的效果。《荷兰》中有一个情节是关于一个爸爸，和不归他养的儿子，以及Google地球的，这是近期我读的小说中最动人的片段之一。爸爸通过Google卫星提供的功能，凝视着儿子卧室的窗户还有那个蓝色充气游泳池，用那“深不可测”的像素搜索一切他能搜索到的，这样每晚都从几千里外在儿子家外徘徊。奥尼尔的小说随处可见这样的情形：密切观察，带有感情的思考，不自觉的就触到了我们的生活。

《荷兰》的情节有两条线。第一条讲述的是一家人。叙述者——汉斯·范·登·布鲁克，他是荷兰裔的股票分析员，他与英国裔老婆雷切尔和儿子住在特里贝卡的一个阁楼。当9.11迫使他们逃到上城区时，他们意外的住进了简陋迷人的切尔西酒店，也就是在那时他们的婚姻出现了裂痕。

雷切尔想带着儿子回英国住进娘家。在远离乔治·布什，远离那个她认为“精神有问题”的美国，儿子才会安全。由于弄不清自己的感受，汉斯开始认为自己是一个“政治宗教白痴”。

他告诉我们，汉斯和雷切尔尽量避免的是“这可能会是历史性错误。我们尽量弄清楚我们是处在一个大灾难之时，比如说三十年代时的欧洲犹太人，或庞贝古城最后的居民；还是可能发生大灾难，就像冷战时的纽约、伦敦、华盛顿，还有那时的莫斯科居民。”但这都不重要了，因为雷切尔带着儿子走了，而汉斯则留在了纽约。

汉斯在纽约活跃的板球文化中找到的慰藉，是本书的另外的一条更明显的脉络。汉斯是那里成百个西印度球队中仅有的几个白人。烟雾蒙蒙的夏季，这些球队分散在各个狭小，不为人知的公园中。

奥尼尔似乎对这项运动十分熟悉。他描述时流露出不经意的优美，比如在描写板球击球手一系列的潜在招式时，他写道：“看，钩，截，扫，盯防，拉，还有其他那些技术都是为了让球不停的滚，不停的滚，就像有魔法一样一直到远处的球场边。”

他们意识到，现在这种板球早已经不是在安的列斯²时他们喜爱的那种运动了。纽约的场地太小了，而且有越来越小的趋势。

奥尼尔为我们打开了曼哈顿这个拥挤世界的边缘，在繁华的曼哈顿面前，如果不是它我们看不见那些数不清的人的抱负。（“你想感觉一下黑人在这个国家的感觉？”书中的一个人物问道。“那就穿上白色的板球服，穿上白色来感觉一下黑人。”）

汉斯在这个复杂的城市的向导是恰克·拉基松，他是一个健谈，处事圆滑的特立尼达人，他以与汉斯不同的生活方式活着。恰克有一些灰色生意（他经营着一家老式‘伟伟’赌博环，并且恐吓他的竞争对手），但他也有着盖茨比式的美国梦，他希望能在布鲁克林建一个世界一流的板球场。

恰克想在他的板球中心发横财，但他有更大的抱负：他差不多想要拯救全世界。他说：“所有人，不管是美国人还是其它什么人，在打板球时都是他们最文明的时候。当印度和巴基斯坦停火时，他们第一件要做的事是什么？他们一定会来一局板球。汉斯，板球是有教育意义的。它从道德上……我得说，我们希望我们跟印度教徒和穆斯林有共同点？恰克·拉基松会让它实现的。有了纽约板球中心，我们就能开启美国历史的新篇章。为什么不呢？”

《荷兰》的一些最好的部分就是恰克漫谈政治和文化时的独白，是在汉斯开车带他时发表的。（表面上，恰克在帮汉斯准备驾驶考试。不知不觉间，汉斯成了恰克的司机，穿梭于他一些最没品味的交易中。）本书的一些小情节发生在切尔西酒店，那里出场了一些怪人——包括一个穿着天使翅膀个婚纱的男人——他们被要求带着便宜的运费。

恰克巨大的板球计划没能成行，他消失于晦涩阴暗、令人不快的环境中。一个朋友问，他自杀了？另一个回答：“你这个白痴！恰克不是那种自杀的人！这家伙内心可不只有十条生命！”

《荷兰》有一点像狡猾，乐观的恰克·拉基松，它里面也包含了不止十本杰出小说。

注：本书暂时没有官方中文译名，也没有通俗叫法，译名为译者所译，如有偏差请及时告知。造成不便请多谅解。

译者注：

¹印第安角：印第安角核电厂距纽约市中心约５６公里，是纽约地区最大的发电站。 印第安角核电站为纽约市和Hudson流域下游提供了近四分之一的电力。

²安的列斯：属荷兰。安的列斯群岛主要由大安的列斯群岛（Greater Antilles）及小安的列斯群岛（Lesser Antilles）所组成。