1.
The word is out – Christopher Eric Hitchens, 61, lifelong litterateur, pamphleteer, bon-vivant, journalist, polemicist, iconoclast, “anti-theist,” author of over a dozen celebrated, debated, loathed and admired works of non-fiction, including a freshly published memoir, is dying. The news has traveled pretty widely and quickly, which is perhaps a sign of something encouraging: we are often told that literary culture is eroding from indifference. Indifference, thankfully, isn’t something to worry about when Hitchens is concerned. I am struck by how many of the reviewers of his memoir begin by “declaring an interest” – sort of a “before we get started, here’s my tale of the Hitch” type thing – and, as a devoted fan, it’s very heartening to find that they are often stories which are gracious and agreeable. It takes a certain kind of person who can be interviewed about his chemotherapy, looking about as good as could be expected, and still have his colleague and interviewer describe the hours spent together as “delightful.”
Hitchens is and has always been the kind of writer who, when considered, seems to demand that one take sides – pro, con, either way works fine, provided there’s no squeamishness or side-shuffling, moral or otherwise. This could be just as fairly said for any polemicist from the sublime (say, Cornel West) to the squalid (Glenn Beck), were it not for the fact that even his enemies would admit that at least he knows whereof he speaks. And then there’s the fact that this love it, hate it, dialectical standard (the Hitch-22 of the title) has pretty much been his modus operandi for a little over sixty years. Hitch himself has written about being annoyed with the boredom and anomie of his demise – you’ve got to admire that kind of stoic panache.
Well, for one thing, Hitch has certainly always had panache to burn. Delving into his memoir as a fan and admirer many things are apparent, not the least of which the fact that the man has done some living. Even a cursory glance registers a life about as examined as it gets: the traveling (several dozen countries and not a few war zones), the friends (Amis, Rushdie, MacEwan, and that’s just the inner circle), the output (two biographies, pamphlets, several large collections of decades of material). If anyone has the right to consider his time not wasted, it’s Hitch. What of his memoirs, then, his own recollections and ruminations on his years of travel, disputation, omnivorous reading and relentless writing? As a devoted fan, I have to say that the usual standard of writing is there, as is the wit and the incisive participation within the roil of history, but I regret to say that some of what might make his memoir truly outstanding is somehow obscured.
I come to praise Hitchens and not to bury him, so I’ll start with the strong points. First of all, Hitchens is an annotated man. Naturally, none of us are without our orbiting texts, especially in a postmodern world, endlessly obsessed with referents and signs and coded histories. Hitchens, however, has the unique ability to accomplish what some philosopher claim is the greatest accomplishment of all: to make one’s life, by living, into a work of art. His annotations come alive. At certain points, Hitchens denies any real talent for fiction writing. He’s too modest – the portraits he draws of his stern, repressed father and his vivacious yet gradually desperate mother are done in loving, honest, moving detail. And as he begins to take you through the various episodes of his life, his introduction to Orwellian thought-crime in English boarding schools, watching and participating in glorious, sordid hackery in the pubs of Fleet Street, first seeing America through the eyes of a coast-to-coast bus trip, literally standing side by side with Salman Rushdie through the ordeal of the fatwa, you begin to feel like you are in the grasp of a fine novel. There is more than a little resemblance to Bellow’s Augie March, for whose 50th anniversary edition he provided an introduction and who remained a favorite writer.
Hitchens’ Bellovian ability to not only remember the many people he meets but to give them back stories and tasteful daubs of prosaic color are intriguing, even when one isn’t necessarily up on his 20th Century labor history. A friend of mine has been reading it on his iPad, with automatic Wikipedia at his fingertips for every proper noun, the better to get instant précis on the large and detailed ensemble cast. The footnotes are rich with anecdotes with a snap and shine all their own. In one chapter on his time in Argentina he not only describes the horror and sheer brutality of its fascist regime but also sees fit to include a lovely, illuminating account of a visit paid to none other than Jorge Luis Borges himself, the master of the Aleph. What a novelist he might have made!
2.
One thing which is unavoidable when talking about Hitch is the fact that for him, the political is personal. Not in the way people generally mean it – in fact, Hitch pours scorn on the kind of thinking which leads people to say “Speaking as a _____, I feel that…” and assume this is a kind of argument, or moral position, since it is after all merely a recitation of external properties: skin pigmentation, ethnic heritage, sexual identity, whatever. It might sound a bit grizzled or cranky to make the counter sally about how it’s not what you think, but how you think that matters. For Hitchens, what he does on the world stage, the causes he supports and the principles he holds, are a part of not only participating in the perpetual movement of history but also of being fully engaged in the world – honestly, critically, challengingly. It’s his way of taking things to task. After he attends to the burial of his mother, in Greece, during a coup against the U.S. backed government, he throws himself into covering the chaos and miasma for his newspaper. After he buries her, he makes sure to put flowers on the grave of George Seferis, the poet and national hero of independent Greece. One personal tragedy is a small parallel to a larger, national loss. For all his bravura and outspokenness, his opinions are not made of idle boasting.
A very pointed and revelatory moment in Hitch-22 is when he remembers what thrill it was, as a Socialist of a very specific kind (with a term for it all its own – the noble name of soixante-huitard, or 68’er) to see that the newspaper he reads along with everyone else is revealing what his own dialectical education and critique has been arguing all along: revolutions in Europe, the miasma of Vietnam, assassinations, civil rights, Cuba, torture by an ostensibly Labor government, yes, the times, they sure are a’changin’. It seems almost quaint these days, when we no longer seem to believe in grand narratives or in revolutionary change, but Hitch is very comfortable in laying down the line:
I began, along with many, many of my contemporaries, to experience a furious disillusionment with “conventional” politics. A bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you may think. My reply is that you should fucking well have been there and seen it for yourself. Had the study of life and literature and history merely domesticated me to waste and betray my youth, and to gape at a spectacle of undisguised atrocity and aggression as if it should be calmly received? I hope never to lose the access to outrage that I felt then.
He never has.
3.
Many reviewers seem to have given a bit of the game away by offering too much of his- and the book’s- biographical heft. I’d rather not do so, if you’ll excuse me – it’s well worth referring you straight to the source. Hitchens is quoted often enough in the world of politics and letters but it’s usually he who is best suited to telling his own story – surprisingly not always the standard for writers. He was born into a somewhat frustrated lower-middle-class British military family, left to deal with the remnants of an England which had suffered and survived the Second World War with honor and fortitude, only to find that there wasn’t much to celebrate within the rubble. As an American, I was heartened to see how the country he discovered, traveling through it as a young man in the 60’s and 70’s, still seems, after the syrupy nostalgia of a boomer generation’s endless and self-congratulatory revisiting of it, exciting and fresh and endlessly innovative.
Ironically, what Hitch-22 lacks is what one would think a memoir might really consist of: what Carl Jung referred to as “memories, dreams, reflections.” So much of his writing is of world-historical importance; everything political he’s done because it was something he knew he could not keep silent about. I find this admirable in many ways. The problem for a long time reader is that Hitch-22 re-evaluates the issues (Iraq, the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, the Vietnam War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall) which have engaged him (and us) for a long time. But when the issue at hand is still pretty fresh, as in the war on terror, it becomes a little redundant. I sort of understand why he had to explain- again – how he made such a dramatic turn in leaving his decades-long post at The Nation, to find new allies to more fully give his support to the Iraq War. As a person who happened to oppose the war and is also an abiding Hitchens fan, I salute and respect his gutsy moral fervor. What I didn’t need from his memoirs is yet another explanation of his relationship with the likes of Ahmed Chalabi and Paul Wolfowitz. The case could easily be made that to hear his memoir is to hear the story of his intellectual development, thus, all the pages about the war are just as important as everything else. Fair enough. But it stands to reason that any interested reader might be fully capable of pursuing Hitchens’ voluminous writings on the matter (The Long Short War, roughly a third of the collection Love, Poverty and War, innumerable pieces in Slate as well as many other places) pretty easily. A reader of a memoir might be more inclined to want to know a bit more about what makes the man himself tick. I don’t want to sound like the over-bearing, ugly American in insisting on this but it’s a lot of pages on something which is, in Hitch’s moral universe, very much a covered topic.
What we don’t get too much of is some of the more universal human events: very little on his children, for example, or the experience of falling in love. He’s been married twice, both times in very long and apparently complex relationships. It’s not a craving for gossip which makes one feel a bit let down that we can’t have Hitchens writing with his usual scholastic aplomb about these kinds of moments. We do get some very enjoyable tales of word games with his friends: having Martin Amis and Rushdie coming up with dirty limericks or substituting words in song titles for playfully obscene lingo is great and all, but there have to have been more interesting conversations to recount than just that. One gets the feeling that Hitch is holding back a bit too much. When we are privy to some of his private reflections, the effect is devastating. A section of the Iraq chapter, previously published in Vanity Fair, contains a very true and profoundly tragic story of a soldier who was inspired to go to Baghdad in part because of reading Hitchens. He attends the burial at the invitation of the family and reads Shakespeare over the grave. This is Hitchens at his best – politics is never just an abstract concept or a trend, it is a way of life and – sadly all too often, of death. If there were any doubts about his commitment to the former in the face of the latter, this book can dispel them. It’s very much to be hoped that he can continue to keep his, however much of it he has left. We need more of him. Here’s hoping that he can manage to stick around long enough to continue to give as much as he can.
Netherland is a good book, and much has already been written, here and elsewhere, to that effect. Its central conceit, that of the New York City immigrant subculture of cricket, provides a fresh perspective on a city about which so much has already been written, and the parallel story, of the dissolution of lonely Hans van der Broek’s marriage, often cuts with the immediacy of real, unmitigated loss. But, and of course there is a but — and perhaps it’s only due to my predilection for stories that come at me “like a big hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky,” as Stephen King put it in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories of 2007 — there is a deep problem with Netherland, and it’s that the book more often exemplifies rather than illuminates the central dilemma that draws its attention, the modern challenge of an individual trying to author a coherent story for his own life.
I can't help but feel that your review is way off-base. If literature has to be about full-throated, deeply engaged people in order to be literature, then oblique folks like Hans need not apply. Only episodes that have an obvious coherence should be depicted. Extraneous bits, characters, observations become bad and should be cut.
One kind of experience–the "it happened to ME and it changed me forever and my life was completely taken over by what happened"–becomes the only kind of experience.
I've read too many books written out of that aesthetic. After a while they just seem flat in their no nuance, relentlessness.
Part of Netherland's greatness springs from the choice not to make Chuck more essential to Hans' life–by which he would mere become another ethnic wiseman. He is given his own integrity as a character. The book touches on his story but isn't complete; it's an oblique partial portrait of Chuck, and only insofar as he entered a strange time in Hans' life. Just as we find out next to nothing regarding Hans' wife's affair with the chef.
Oblique, get it? Like so much of life. As well as so much great literature.
I found your review interesting and disappointing. For a book I've not read, I like to get some idea of what the book does well as well as it's weaknesses. You give no sense of the writing–no quotes, no close reading of selected passages. Your own disappointment, by the end of the review, comes to feel like pressure you're exerting on the author, postpartum: a complaint that he hasn't written a book that serves up the kind of pleasure you prefer. You acknowledge intellectual and aesthetic engagement (the books evident strengths) without explaining what they are: intellectual and aesthetic engagement are quite enough for some–what is it that makes your preferred pleasures superior? That's not a rhetorical question; had you explained this better I might still disagree in my assessment of the book, but would not have reason to be disappointed with your review.
Drew and Jacob- Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment.
I think you're right, Jacob, that a review should explain both the good and less good of a novel. In this case, I chose to focus more on what I didnt like about Netherland because, given how much critical praise the book has already received, I thought readers would have plenty of other places to learn about the book's strengths.
And Drew, some of my favorite literary characters are every bit as disengaged as Hans (Rabbit Angstrom and Frank Bascombe, for two), but in both those cases Updike and Ford wrap the disengagement in a story (nothing dramatic, just the quiet intensity of everyday life), and for me as a reader, it's the story, not the original idea of the disengagement, that makes the characters real. Absent a story to pair with the conception of Hans, I found his character to be less real, understandable or compelling.
Kevin,
I read your review with great interest, more so when it became apparent that it was articulating the vague dissatisfaction that I too had when reading Netherland. While the prose is excellent, and the mechanics of writing are clearly in evidence, I found myself feeling the same way about many of the flashback vignettes. For the most part, I kept wondering "why should I care about this?" Some of the backstory was almost ADD-like , seeming to drift off in only vaguely tangential ways.
For example, unless I'm missing some incredibly important metaphor, why should I have cared that there were parrots or parakeets in the cemetary where Chuck wished to be buried? Did it really flesh out his character, or the character of his long suffering wife? If it was intended to do that, the effort was lost on me. I found myself thinking "Where is this whole bird story leading?", which, for me, was decidedly nowhere.
Of course, I always hold out the notion that perhaps I just missed something, and was not sufficiently engaged enough to glean the important truth from the text. If that is the case, I'm guilty as charged.
Thus, in large part, your review captured exactly the feelings that I was having at many points in the novel.
However, I must disagree with some of your observations, particularly those regarding the cricket metaphor that pervades the novel. I'm not sure what you familiarity is with this game, but I am the president of a local cricket club in upstate NY, and as a native born American and one of only two such members on the club, I can say that O'Neill captures the sub-culture with 100% accuracy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his encounter with the Sri Lankan taxicab driver.
While you opined "Reading Hans' conversation with the cab driver, I was struck by the improbability of the social engagement that results." I could only think "That's EXACTLY what would have happened.." in such a situation as that. Although cricket is largely an immigrant sub-cultural phenomenon here in the U.S., in my personal experience, the mere mention of in interest in the game sparks an almost instant bonding between individuals. I cannot explain why, but clearly O'Neill understands this. I will agree that USUALLY the social connection between a cab driver and his fare in NYC would be virtually non-existent, but there is no question that the sport of cricket would EASILY transcend that taboo and render it inert…..
(I must confess, though, I share an obsession with the game of cricket that closely parallels Chuck Ramkisoon's in the novel, so my thoughts and opinions on this subject must be taken in that light….O'Neil's description of Chuck's dream cricket stadium and optimism about it's potential success are so much like my own, it's scary…. Much of Chuck's dialogue about cricket sounds eerily similar to my own pontifications regarding the sport in the U.S… but that's a whole other story!)
Thanks for the review, and for putting to words many of the thoughts I shared regarding Netherland….. Despite the shortcomings you mentioned, the cricket content alone is enough for me to recommend the novel to my friends and colleagues, certainly those who play cricket in this country.
I agree with steve w's comment about the longueurs and I also felt that the conversation about sports between the immigrant cabdriver and the millionaire financial analyst seemed entirely possible (and thanks also for the insider's opinion about the sport). The parrots who inhabit the Brooklyn cemetery where Chuck wishes to be buried seem like an obvious symbol for immigration, although I wondered about the migratory instincts of such creatures.
Other than that I agree with Kevin's opinions and observations. The linear arrangement of photos in the album seems to be the antithesis of this novel in terms of form, as described by Garth in his review.
The parent or patient who suffers from memory loss or Alzheimer's is a character that seems to reappear in "9/11 novels" like Ian McEwan's "Saturday" and DeLillo's "Falling Man." I think it's meant to represent something like generational change.
I think it's the loss of the mother that causes Hans's malaise and leads to the breakup of his marriage. After 9/11 I think Chuck becomes a kind of father figure to Hans, who was raised without one. Although his mother is a loving parent, she's not much of an authority figure. For instance, when she catches him skating in the canal playing hooky she's surprisingly nonjudgemental. Chuck's death in the Gowanus Canal reminded me of it. The ending is sentimental but I didn't mind it.