An Absence of Feeling: A Review of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland

In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers describes the origins of his first publishing endeavor. The first ad (well, it was a sticker, but whatever) read thusly:
SCREW THOSE IDIOTS.
MIGHT MAGAZINE.
In typically postmodern (and neurotic) response to this, Eggers realizes that something’s amiss about the sticker: “It’s unclear who is being screwed. Who are the idiots that should be getting screwed?” He imagines a few ways in which this ambiguity could have been avoided:
MIGHT MAGAZINE SAYS:
SCREW THOSE IDIOTS.
Or
“SCREW THOSE IDIOTS,”
SAYS MIGHT MAGAZINE
 Or
SCREW THOSE IDIOTS
(“THOSE IDIOTS” NOT REFERRING TO THOSE BEHIND
MIGHT MAGAZINE, THE MAKERS OF THIS STICKER,
WHO ARE GOOD PEOPLE AND SHOULD NOT BE SCREWED.)
The whole point of the marketing strategy was to intrigue people, to make them think, “What is Might?…I do not know, but when it becomes clear what it is that they will be doing, I will be very interested in their doings.”

One could have easily said the same of Mr. Eggers at that point in his career. Who is this young, ballsy writer? Though older than the rest, Eggers’s debut came along with a group of writers we could call the Undergraduates –– young, precocious authors with daring, audacious styles. Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Z.Z. Packer all made their debuts around the same handful of years. (The Graduates, of course, being David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Jeffrey Eugenidies, et al.) Eggers, here, would be that older guy in the class, somehow funnier and smarter than everyone else, even if he never ends up graduating.

For Eggers definitely did not graduate with his class. No, he dropped out and started his own ventures. Who would have been able to predict the trajectory of Eggers’s career? From that original (but now in some ways dated) first book, Eggers has since stepped in nearly every field relating to writing: he published two story collections (one of which is flash fiction), novels, and two nonfiction works; he co-wrote two screenplays; he has written comic strips and essays and song lyrics; he founded The Believer, Wholphin, and 826 National, a non-profit that helps kids with writing; and he edits the annual Best American Non-Required Reading series, with the help of students. He’s been nominated for numerous awards (including the Pulitzer and the National Books Critics Circle Award) and won others (including the Salon Book Award and the American Book Award). But by the far the most influential contribution Eggers has made on the literary landscape is McSweeney’s, the so-called “Quarterly Concern” that has, for the last 15 years, produced some of the most original fiction and nonfiction out there, all packaged in some of the most beautiful and innovative book designs ever printed. Who is this young man? We didn’t know, but when it became clear what it was that he was doing, we all became very interested in his doings.

McSweeney’s could be called aggressively progressive. Not only are the stories often unconventional, experimental, and unique, so are the issues themselves. Some are conceptual designs, as in Issue 21, the cover of which has a little flap and if you pull it out it makes the cover connect to the back, creating “an unending panorama, a revelatory 360-degree immersion into a packed and pointy world.” Or Issue 26, which came in three small, postcard sized books and were “based on the World War II-era Armed Services Editions released by the Council on Books in Wartime, under the auspices of the U.S. War Department’s Morale Branch.” Or Issue 33, which was presented as a full-blown newspaper called The San Francisco Panorama. Others featured extremely original (and sometimes downright odd) theme: Issue 31’s aim to unearth “neglected or deceased literary forms,” such as the pantoum, the whore dialogue, the Socratic dialogue and Graustrarkian Romance (whatever the hell that is), or Issue 32’s challenge for authors to “travel to somewhere in the world…and send back a story set in that spot fifteen years from now, in the year 2024.”

Even the issues without a conceptual design or a creative theme are elegantly and beautifully rendered. Behind this progressive innovation lies an old-fashioned love of books as objects. McSweeney’s, I think, deserves much credit (and should, in various ways, be followed) for figuring out a way to make printed works not only relevant but also wholly separate from the latest digital iterations. You can’t ever make an e-book as gorgeous to look at or as wonderful to hold in your hands. And to those people who think covers and jackets and designs don’t matter, well I say this: Screw those idiots.

Same goes for those who dismiss the entire enterprise of McSweeney’s as a hipster outlet for quirky nonsense and youthful haranguing. We have now The Best of McSweeney’s, a 600+-page anthology that samples from everything they’ve put out in the last decade and a half. I would defy anyone to read this thing cover-to-cover and still maintain that McSweeney’s has contributed nothing to the world of creative art. As the back of the books promises, The Best of McSweeney’s gives us “a fascinating glimpse into recent literary history.” This is true for more than just the merit of the pieces included (though they are nearly all great), but for the unexpected insights their inclusion brings out.

This book is simply brimming with priceless inside looks into the workings of contemporary writers. Many of the stories are introduced by their authors, giving us a little bit of backstory into the creation of the thing. Wells Tower’s presents us with two versions of the same story, “Retreat,” which appeared in Issues 23 and 30, respectively. Each contain the same characters, the same essential setup, and even much of the same lines. Only the perspectives are different, but boy does that change the whole of it. In explaining why he struggled so much with this story, Tower cites “all the long-form nonfiction” he’d been writing. Here, he explains one difference between fiction and non-:
Nonfiction –– even ‘literary’ nonfiction –– call for tools and processes that are pretty much useless when it comes to making short stories. In metalworking, they have this term, ‘cold connections,’ which is when you take two pieces of metal and rivet. A few smart bashes, and you’ve got a bracelet with lots of nice bangles on it, and you’ve spared yourself the hot, tedious business of soldering and sweating joints. In a pinch, nonfiction can squeak by on cold connections.
Tower’s two iterations of “Retreat” (as well as his comments on them) offer a fascinating example of how much one can do with a single premise.

We are later, of course, to see Tower’s “Retreat” reappear in his collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, and we now know which version he prefers (the second one, FYI). Many of the stories here ended up in well-acclaimed collections, and one of the great aspects of this anthology is getting to see them in earlier drafts. David Foster Wallace’s story “Mr. Squishy” appears here, and one very subtle change that occurred between its appearance in McSweeney’s (under the pseudonym Elizabeth Klemm, a moniker everyone saw straight through)and its inclusion in Wallace’s Oblivion is worth noting. When “Mr. Squishy” graced the pages of Issue 5, the opening line read: “The Focus Group was reconvened in another of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt’s 19th-floor conference rooms.” In Oblivion, it reads: “The Focus Group was then reconvened in another of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising’s nineteenth-floor conference rooms” (italics mine). Besides spelling out 19th (Wallace often used shorthand, acronyms and abbreviations in order to fit as many words in as little space as possible) and clarifying just what “Reesemeyer Shannon Belt” did as a company, the addition of the word then is hugely significant. It completely changes the opening line, albeit in a small way. In the first version, the line functions as a beginning; in the final version, we join a narrative already in progress. We missed what came before then, as if the story had been going on long before we came to it.

Other highlights: a rare short story from Zadie Smith, taken from the issue that pitted McSweeney’s against They Might Be Giants. A section of comics from Issue 13 featuring funny and poignant pieces by Chris Ware, Daniel C. Clowes, Joe Sacco, and Adrian Tomine. Andrew Sean Greer’s hilarious account of his and his husband’s experience at a NASCAR event in Michigan (from the San Francisco Panorama issue). We get Jonathan Ames’s “Bored to Death,” inspiration for the HBO series of the same name, George Saunders’s “Four Institutional Monologues,” one of which only recently (despite the story being published in 2000) appeared in his latest collection, Tenth of December, and a trio of stories from International writers, deriving from issues dedicated to Norwegian, South Sudanese, and Indigenous Australian fiction.

But this being McSweeney’s, there’s a lot more than stories. Included here are also the best letters they’ve ever received, from the likes of Sarah Vowell, Peter Orner, and John Hodgman.  There are four pantoums from the “neglected and deceased” forms issue, as well as a few 20-minute stories, which are exactly what they sound like: stories written in 20 minutes flat (although Aleksandar Hemon admits that his took 30). In other words, this is a fun and eclectic anthology, perfectly in keeping with the McSweeney’s philosophy, which Eggers explains in his Introduction thusly: “That’s what we look for –– writers who make us feel like they’re seeing their world, whatever that is, with fresh eyes, and who allow us to experience it through their words.” McSweeney’s, like Eggers himself, regularly provides the world with interesting and unique perspectives –– from different cultures, different personalities, and different aesthetic approaches. It does what all literary journals should aim to do. That is, be bigger than the sum of its parts, yet still allow each part to stand on its own. It’s a hard line to walk, but McSweeney’s, with its irreverent attitude and pure love of good writing, manage to do every issue, every year.

Despite some notable exclusions (no Joyce Carol Oates? no Yannick Murphy?), The Best of McSweeney’s is a triumph, not only as a stand-alone book, but also (and especially) as a testament to the power of the short story, the essay, the experiment. A tribute, too, to the power of one person’s vision, proof that writers can influence the world outside the borders of their prose. Eggers, lucky for us, has a great deal of passion for the work of other people, for supporting new writers and celebrating neglected ones. His and his colleagues’ (Jordan Bass and Eli Horowitz, the two editors of McSweeney’s) is an essentially artistic project but underneath that is a layer of fierce morality, one that believes in the rights of people and the importance of their stories.

From time to time I read your glossy publications.  One of my favorite things to do is visit my mom, lie on her couch, and read Hello magazine or Vanity Fair (she has the TLS, too, but that’s not very glossy).  Sometimes I look at the pictures in Paris Match.  My mom and her friends have an ingenious cost-saving publication cooperative, wherein one shopping bag full of books and magazines gets passed around until everyone has read its contents.
 
Lacking such a network, and not being in a position to spend six dollars on a photo spread of a celebrity dressed up to look like another, different celebrity, I occasionally try to recreate the experience online (it’s not even close).  This is where I found Sam Kashner’s telling of the sad story of William Manchester, the historian tapped by Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy to preempt the jackals and write the authorized account of JFK’s assassination.  According to the article, Manchester researched and wrote himself into illness.  Then Jacqueline, regretting her hours of private taped meetings with Manchester and the revelations made therein, launched an assault against the author and his work.  The fallout and the eventual publication history is all there in the article.  The experience crushed Manchester, although the book, The Death of a President, did eventually appear.  
 
The story caught my fancy.  I started thinking about it from the market perspective, and spent a fun half hour trawling the internet and gawking at choice specimens of Kennedyana.  Eventually, I bought a copy of Manchester’s book. (Since the book is out of print, some online selling algorithms have inflated its price substantially. Even so, inexpensive copies of first editions and early reprints proliferate online and are easily found on meta-search sites like Via Libri.)
 
Obviously, a billion trees’ worth of pages, glossy and unglossy, have been devoted to various Kennedys (sex, scandals, outfits, and deaths, mainly).  I’ve absorbed through osmosis that which floats around in the collective American consciousness, but I didn’t actually know much about Kennedy’s politics, the assassination, or the political climate at the time.
 
The Death of a President, unsurprisingly, is pure hagiography, but that’s actually the large part of its charm.  For one, Manchester had been given this herculean task directly from the boss, so to speak, and the pressure must have been enormous to do justice to his subject.  Additionally, his devotion to the slain president is evident on every page, and the prose has a dated, chivalrous quality that would seem comic in a contemporary work of non-fiction.  It goes without saying that Marilyn does not feature in this story, nor Jackie (maybe) looking sideways at Bobby.  Here’s JFK on the gurney: “By now, one would think, Kennedy would have bled white, but his great heart continued to pump…”  It’s not just Manchester, though, who is painting an idealized picture.  Everyone was in it together in the construction of Camelot–the family’s Secret Service names were Lancer, Lace, Lyric, and Lark, for God’s sake.
 
Poetic flights notwithstanding, Manchester accounts for every moment leading up to November 22, and the ones that followed.  While it would be easy to make this exhaustive approach a very tedious read, Manchester imbues the pages before the denouement with a palpable sense of dread, creating this inexorable pace.  The suspense he conjures is all quite distinct from the things which the reader necessarily brings to the book.  He also does an extraordinary job of describing the absolute chaos following the assassination, even and especially within the Kennedy/Johnson camp, which was, apparently, wholly unprepared for this contingency.  Manchester paints a picture of a country adrift.  People cramming the streets, wandering aimlessly, putting on one sock, calling the White House.  
 
Like many people, I’ve got Mad Men fever.  That may have been one of the reasons I felt compelled to read this book; it’s got that attractive reek of cigarettes and hair pomade.  The book, as far as research and writing style, is a perfect snapshot of a time, which is what everyone says about Mad Men.  Except this book is like, real, and Mad Men is a television show.  Where Mad Men has a man playing Conrad Hilton, Manchester’s book features the authentic young Bill Moyers, and Walter Cronkite saying “This is Walter Cronkite, and you’re a goddamned idiot.”  For someone who missed this period of history, it’s fascinating.  I’m sure it holds a different appeal for the people who didn’t.
 
Despite its throw-back feel, The Death of a President also seems (terrifyingly) timely.  On the one hand, I guess you can take comfort from Manchester’s descriptions of Texas generally, and Dallas particularly, before the assassination, in the sense that venomous, ugly invective of a political nature is nothing new.  The Warren commission, Manchester points out, declared that the political climate of Dallas had no bearing on the actions of Oswald, who was a lone, pseudo-communist, ex-military whack job.  On the other hand, Manchester spends a lot of time talking about and roundly condemning the Dallas climate, positing that an act like Oswald’s simply cannot take place in a vacuum.  I found these portions of the text chilling. On Dallas:
In that third year of the Kennedy Presidency a kind of fever lay over Dallas County.  Mad things happened.  Huge billboards screamed “Impeach Earl Warren.”  Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas.  Fanatical young matrons swayed in public to the chant, “Stevenson’s going to die–his heart will stop, stop, stop and he will burn, burn burn!” Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; junior executives were required to attend radical seminars.  Dallas had become the mecca for medicine-show evangelists of the National Indignation Convention, the Christian Crusaders, the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies . . . In Dallas a retired major general flew the American flag upside down in front of his house, and when, on Labor Day of 1963, the Stars and Stripes were hoisted right side up outside his own home by County Treasurer Warren G. Harding–named by Democratic parents for a Republican President in an era when all Texas children were taught to respect the Presidency, regardless of party–Harding was accosted by a physician’s son, who remarked bitterly, “That’s the Democrat flag.  Why not just run up the hammer and sickle while you’re at it?
On the day Kennedy arrived in Dallas, a local group took out a full-page ad in the paper which said, among other things “Why have you ordered or permitted your brother Bobby, the Attorney General, to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you, your administration, and your leadership?”
 
This all sounds too familiar.  It goes on for pages.  Politicians like William Fulbright and Adlai Stevenson worried about the President’s safety in Dallas, although they expected harm to come from one of the vocal groups who loathed Kennedy, not some loner weirdo.  It’s like going into a pit with bears and tigers and hippos, and then being killed by a tiny venomous bug.  The irony about all this is that, as with our own President, the accusations leveled at JFK were largely centered on his purported Communist sympathies, even though, as my beloved puts it, “Nobody hated Commies more than JFK.”  Now, as then, bewildered Communists everywhere are looking at each other and thinking, if this President is a Communist (and a Nazi, against all odds) maybe I should change parties?
 
I want to focus on the positive.  The world has changed.  But sometimes it doesn’t seem that it has changed very much.  The Birchers became Birthers; the Minutemen kept the same name.  And in every town in America, there’s an unaffiliated loon with a military-grade weapon (or ten).  And it gives me the goddamned willies.

1.
As if spinning a prayer wheel, this year’s Best European Fiction anthology once again gets rolling via a discussion of A. The Decay of Literary Culture, B. America’s Culpability In This, and C. The Scourge Of Consumerism (cf. B and A, in turn). “Back in 1984, when I visited America for the first time,” Slovenian novelist/playwright/essayist Drago Jancar writes in his preface, “on my very first day I noticed to my surprise that, try as I might, I wasn’t going to find a section labeled Culture in any of the newspapers.” Instead, “exhibits, plays, even literary readings were all listed under Entertainment.” America’s priapic obsession with being entertained has infected Europe, Jancar goes on to say, a development that is especially unfortunate in places like the Former Yugoslavia where, once safe from capitalism’s ineluctable decline into consumerism, people actually used to care deeply for words like culture and literature.

It’s true that the Americanization of everywhere hasn’t exactly turned out great for everyone, writers especially. “In Eastern Europe there is no shortage of disappointment in this brave new world,” notes Jancar.

Many writers who once thought that democracy and the new, relaxed atmosphere it lent society would validate the deep longing for freedom that was present in their works and that once brought them renown, now look upon the general apathy of their societies in despair.

Others…who were convinced that their literature spoke from out of the depths of the nation’s spirit and expressed an authentic genius loci, look at the literary kitsch everywhere around them in disgust.

As for the writers “who joined in on the easy minting of generic entertainment” born fully formed from the thigh of capitalism, they have discovered “that democracy is … a very majoritarian affair, well-suited to mediocrity,” and “bigger sales figures.”

The shift Jancar is talking about, from Yugoslavia to the countries that now make up the areas of the Former Yugoslavia, from a communist system to a capitalistic one, from a collective literary tradition to an assemblage of minor traditions, has, no doubt, engendered many of the problems he points to. But, though serious writing does, indeed, run counter to the impulses that consumerism promulgates, I’d hesitate to say the endpoint of this opposition is the death of serious writing. More often, great literature is the force that presses up against vapidity. Not to overthrow it, mind you, but to transform and trouble it. Jancar’s formulation (consumerism up; great literature down) misses this, I think, by offering a binary that is accurate without being true. Rather than being troubled over the marginalization of great literature, one might wonder why the margin seems to be the natural place for it.

Drowning recently inside of CNN.com (where, as a matter of self-preservation, I no longer even read the articles: just the comments that follow them) I came across a remark written by a Paul R in response to a piece on the importance of the amazon.com bestseller list: “Sorry, New York Times,” wrote Paul R, gleefully, “but I guess your Bestseller List is irrelevant now.”

Obviously, Paul R was not sorry: he was happy. But why?

To begin with, Paul R doesn’t believe there is any such thing as great literature. In his mind, the New York Times exists in a landscape where elitists make decisions about what he, Paul R, is supposed to read. He wants a bottom up system, not a top down one. Democracy, not elitism; the consumer model of culture. In a perfect Paul-R-world, nobody knows better than Paul R.

Paul R represents a set of ideas that, rather curiously, has numerous followers but no actual defenders. It’s impossible, that is, to imagine a thoughtful argument against literature, even though we live in a society that makes its creation (almost) impossible. But that near impossibility is, again, the point.

As if in response to Jancar’s preface, Paul R’s howling against the internet void suggests a question: Is it possible to have a cultured society when the notion of a genius loci is antithetical to everything that culture thinks it wants to stand for? The short answer is: No. Devoid of individuals of genius (excepting, of course, celebrities) opinion becomes a very, very important word in cultures like these. It’s not hard to see how the elevation of opinion into ontological gold might kill off a citizenry’s interest in great literature. The longer answer is: Yes.

2.
The Best European Fiction 2014, despite the Marketing 101-sound of its title, is meant to be a curative for the economic imperative that has killed or is killing literature. Pace Jancar:
The question becomes less amusing if we look around and consider the environment that literature actually inhabits today…the erosion of well-defined aesthetic criteria and a flood of literary commercialization that demands and rewards superficiality, easy reads, and bestsellerdom. Even in the eyes of a growing number of publishers’ manuscript readers, these qualities have apparently replaced elitism, challenge, and the tedium of Great and Profound literature.
These stories, Jancar asserts, are less about plot than style, more about contemplation than quickness, on the side of seriousness, and averse to the trite. There are twenty-seven stories in this year’s collection, with writings in translation from a diverse range of countries: Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, France, Moldova, Iceland, Slovakia, and Liechtenstein.

European might as well be a byword for varied, which isn’t a critique of the choices. No one, one hopes, expects to get more (or less) than a kaleidoscopic view of what is being written on the European continent today in a single anthology.

The histories of Bosnia & Herzegovina, in Elvis Hadzic’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Zec,” Croatia in Olja Savicevic Ivancevic’s “Adios Cowboy,” Belarus in Vladimir Kozlov’s “Politics,” Montenegro in Lena Ruth Stefanovic’s “The New Testament,” and Moldova in Ioan Manascurta’s “How I Was Going to Die on the Battlefield” all receive literary investigation, while stories like “Fear of Ankles,” by Katya Atanasova from Bulgaria, and “The Pool,” by Slovenian Vesna Lemaic, eschew history in favor of more surreal terrains. Eric Chevillard’s “Hippopotamus,” from France, provides a vision of a consumerist wandering in Mali as a tourist-writer, while Estonian writer Emily Tode’s “Interpretation” shows us Western Europe’s abundance, as viewed by a figure from a former Soviet Republic. “The Man in the Yellow Parka,” by French Belgian writer Thierry Horguelin, is the standout story in the collection.

Reminiscent of Jose Saramago’s The Double, Horguelin’s fabulist tale puts us in a TV world only to make its apparent banality fantastic, as the narrator becomes interested in a background character — dressed in a yellow parka — in the impossibly bad-sounding 1980s American series Simple Cops:
That the same extra, in the same loud jacket, had ambled through two episodes of a single series was already unusual. Was the production really that broke? But when I saw him again the next week, I really thought I was losing it. Still, there he was, sitting on a bench in the background of a public square, bringing a bottle in a brown paper bag to his lips. What did it mean?
Here one has to go back to the idea of great literature existing (or not) inside of a consumer society. The story itself is after all about that most dilapidated realm of the consumer world, late night TV. What unfolds is a remarkable exploration of the creeping strangeness that is piled up just on the edge of our daily lives, especially those portions taken up by flickering screens. More to the point, Horguelin is engaging exactly with the kind of consumerist schlock that Jancar critiques as the end of great literature. Of course, in this case, it’s the exact opposite that occurs. Which prompts the question: Mightn’t one flip the usual hyperboles and point not only to great literature’s capacity for transcending and transforming consumer culture, but also to those places where consumerism and great literature keep each other moving, the way opposing magnetic forces propel bullet trains?

Another tale of great strangeness, Lithuanian Kerkus Kuncius’s “Belovezh,” which takes its name from the Belovezhskaya Forrest in Belarus (Byelavyezhskaya Pushcha), where the Belovezh Accord was signed, effectively dissolving the Soviet Union, centers on a forest ranger named Kalina Baluta. After some improprieties between himself and a snared deer, the story concludes:
Once again full of energy, Kalina Baluta returned to his wife, and she was bawling. And our sensitive forest ranger had no reason to suspect that today, with just barely a year between himself and retirement, the largest country in the world, the USSR, had been erased from the map thanks to a few careless signatures in Belovezh.
Bosnian Elvis Hadzic’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Zec,” which is explicitly dedicated to “the victims of the Srebrenica massacre,” presents this remarkably overlooked blight on the twentieth century with a heroic mixture of emotion and reserve. One is reminded, by Hadzic’s story, of a purpose once ascribed to literature — to speak for those who cannot speak — once articulated so well by someone who is no doubt dear to Hadzic, Danilo Kis, and which clearly has a diminishing return in the sort of economic imperatives Jancar ascribes to the brave new (literary) world.

3.
One possible implication of The Best European Fiction series is not only that Europe is going the way of America, but that the stories in it already represent the kind of writing that isn’t possible in America anymore. Absurd, of course. Blake Butler, Bob Shacoccis, Amelia Gray, Sergio de la Pava, William Gass, David Foster Wallace, or, indeed, Eliot, Stevens, Pound, and Faulkner. The list goes on, as lists do, but the case could easily be made that if American literature is to be accused of anything, it’s an obsession with being difficult. Great. Serious. Not because of its consumerism, nor in spite of it, just unavoidably so, right alongside it.

None of this has ever been a question of bestseller lists. Great literature has always been around, always will be around, not in spite of its selective readership, but because of it. This point is made near the end of The Best European Fiction 2014, in Swiss writer Christoph Simon’s “Fairy Tales From the World of Publishing.” It offers a parable about two poets splitting their last reader in half. It’s a story that is well worth reading, especially if only very few people end up reading it. It’s the perfect concoction for our times: a literary vision whose truth depends on the fact that hardly anyone will read it.