The Dog by Joseph O'Neill

Joseph O’Neill won the PEN/Faulkner fiction award for the novel Netherland in 2009.  The novel describes the life, in New York, of a man from The Netherlands.  In an attempt to acclimate himself to his new land, he joins a cricket club and begins playing with the team.  The novel is about finding one’s way and place in a foreign land.  He continues this theme in his latest novel, The Dog.

O’Neill was born in Cork County, Ireland of an Irish father and a Syrian Catholic mother.  His family traveled a lot, but they settled in England, where O’Neill became a barrister with chambers in the Temple.  He handled business law cases.  Since 1998 he has lived in New York City where he teaches at Bard College.

The Dog is a peculiar, yet engaging story of a man distraught over a break-up with Jenn, his partner.  He runs into a college friend, Eddie Batros, the youngest son of a wealthy resident of Dubai.  He offers the narrator a job as “Family Officer,” which has a vague, but eclectic, list of duties.  These duties include anything from babysitting a 14-year-old, Alain, who is struggling in school to approving checks for the family foundation.  The name of this narrator is never specifically mentioned, but he refers to himself as “I/Godfrey Pardew.”  The story also includes a number of unusual characters, who make his attempt to assimilate into the Dubai culture all the more difficult.

O’Neill uses long, long sentences with numerous parentheticals.  He sometimes closes sentences with as many as 3, 4, 5, or even 6.  He writes in one instance, “(In my book, the win-win-win ideal, valuable advance though it is on the mere win-win, does not go far enough.  It seems unsatisfactory to restrict the stakeholders in a given transaction to the two transactors plus the inescapable third party, to wit, the planetary/global lot. There is a fourth admittedly subjective and conceptually vague interest at stake, namely the effect of the transaction in terms of the human race’s susceptibility to downfall or glory.  And I suspect, uselessly and a little awfully, that the definition there must be a further, fifth plane of moral reality, beyond our animal comprehension, involving interest that transcend even the destinies of our planet and of the human soul.  I do not mean the divine or the universal as such.  Nor am I mystically hinting at some cosmic good news.  If only I were!)” (86).

An old say goes, “Once a lawyer, always a lawyer.”  O’Neill is a lawyer; I/Godfrey Pardew is a lawyer, so inevitability the bony hand of the law guides some of the prose.  Pardew also has a fondness for writing email which are requests for clarifications, complaints, and candid opinions.  However, he never sends any of these letters.  He fails to completely understand the culture of Dubai, and it costs him in the end.

Pardew’s days consist of shuffling paper, signing a few documents, talking to Alain and his assistant Ali, drinking, scuba diving, and relaxing in his massage chair.  While the story in The Dog by Joseph O’Neill does hold the reader’s interest, the meanderings of his mind and sentences, at whose length the mind boggles, did become a tad annoying.  Only my wondering at what might happen to him tenuously held me from invoking the Rule of 50.  4 stars.

--Chiron, 6/10/15

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

This novel won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award and a friend recommended it after a discussion of some of its post-modern qualities. Although well-written, I am not entirely convinced it deserves the accolades showered upon it.

First of all, it flips back and forth between first and third person, much like the narrative flips back and forth between present, future, and past. This book most definitely will require another read, so I can track these changes and see if some narrative justification exists for these shifts.

O'Neill has written a fine, interesting story of a Dutch financial analyst, Hans, who travels with his wife, Rachel, to New York from London. The reason for these job changes does not come out in the early chapters, but only much further along. Had I had this information, my understanding of the events in the "present" would have made more sense, and the "future" events would have been more logical. Because O'Neill jumped around, following the motivations of these characters became a chore.

Also, the early parts of the book -- the prose seems a bit stiff -- possesses a voice different from later parts, which seem more natural, like this passage, when Hans describes an incident from his childhood in the Netherlands:

"The old visual domain was unchanged: a long series of unlit back gardens leading to the almost indiscernible silhouette of dunes. To the north, which was to my right, the Scheveningen lighthouse twinkled for a second, then fell dark, then suddenly produced its beam, a skittish mile of light that became lost somewhere in the blue and black above the dunes. These sand hills had been my idea of wilderness. Pheasants, rabbits, and small birds of prey lived and died there. On escapades with a friend or two, we would urge our twelve-year-old bodies under the barbed wire lining the footpaths and run through the sand-grass into the wooded depths of the dunes." (86)

I got the impression this represented the height of mischief and rebellion for the young boy. This passage also reminds me of young Stephen Daedalus coping with the vagaries of Clongowes in Poratrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The novel contains long paragraphs that seem ever so slightly organized to prevent the conclusion that Hans is day dreaming or we are experiencing his stream of consciousness, I found myself frequently back-tracking to find out where I was.

Despite these drawbacks, I could not bring myself to abandon the story. I cared about Hans, and took his side in the discussions with Rachel. Fortunately, I have a large book of cricket rules, so I could make sense of some of the many references to the sport. However, some deeper connection between life and cricket must lie buried in all this, but I do not know enough about the sport to figure that out. Four stars

--Chiron, 7/25/09