Recently, I had to advise a student on his work, a city-based novel that seemed to me to be peculiarly blind in its telling, although it was not without other virtues. An example would be a street scene, which he described as ‘surreal’. The surrealism was entirely asserted. No instance was given, no detail was provided that convinced me of this surrealism or conjured it in my reader’s mind.
My advice was: ‘Put us in the street, rather than this generalised gesture at scene–setting. And think about what your character sees in the world. What he sees, informs us of him, his past, his present state of mind, his desires. This is a character that once had a job, a family, a suit, a car, a man who walked a city street with purpose, belonging there, and now he has made himself an exile, almost a ghost. No longer part of the life he sees, what would he notice? Stop summarising the very things that will give your novel heart and that will win our hearts.’
I then started reading Joseph O’Neill’s novel,
Netherland, and came across his description of Times Square subway station (p18). It seemed to illustrate my point. The narrator, we have learned, in the aftermath of 9/11, is becoming estranged from his wife. What he sees in the station - how he sees it - shows us who he is and what is happening to him. He notices a ‘little Hispanic man dancing with a life-sized dummy.' I thought this description the kind of ‘surreal’ detail that might help the student and quoted part of it for him:
Dressed entirely in black and gripping his inanimate partner with grotesque eagerness, the man sweated and pranced and shuffled his way through a series … of fox trots and tangos and fandangos and pasodobles ... There was something dire going on—something that went beyond the desperation, intently twitching and nuzzling his puppet to the movement of the music, his eyes always sealed…. Crude features had been inscribed on her face, and this gave her a blank, bottomless look … and yet this man was nakedly in thrall to her.
This, I wrote the student, was not a major set piece in the novel; it was a passing detail, but few details in a good novel are merely ‘passing’: they are intent on indicating the novel’s consciousness. This particular detail shows us how the narrator looks out at the world through lenses shaped by what pre-occupies him – a failing marriage, a traumatised city, his own powerlessness in the face of both.
Job done, I returned to the novel, but my pleasure in it has diminished. Something nags me about the writing, and, specifically, the description I had quoted to the student. Was it only a desire for speed that led me to cut so much of it?
The hype surrounding it - and its interest in cricket - made me resistant to reading it, but I was stirred into picking it up after reading two blog entries concerning it from
Mason Wyatt, in which a reader had criticised O’Neill’s style and gave this as an instance of it:
Over half the rooms were occupied by long-term residents who by their furtiveness and ornamental diversity reminded me of the population of the aquarium I’d kept as a child, a murky tank in which cheap fish hesitated in weeds and an artificial starfish made a firmament of the gravel
The reader’s objections and Wyatt Mason’s replies can be read
here and
here. I had no objection to the sentence quoted, but, in general, I could see that O’Neill’s prose can seem, as Mason’s interlocutor describes it, ‘fusty or ornate. Though sometimes the descriptions are precise and impressive, other times… he uses a bigger word when a smaller one would be better.’
I went back to the passage I had quoted to the student. Here it is without my edits:
Throngs endlessly climbed and descended the passages like Esher’s tramping figures. Bare high-wattage bulbs hung from the low-lying girders, and temporary partitions and wooden platforms and posted handwritten directions signalled that around us a hidden and incalculable process of construction or ruination was being undertaken. The unfathomable and catastrophic atmosphere was only heightened by the ever-present spectacle, in one of the principal caverns of that station of a little man dancing with a life-sized dummy. Dressed entirely in black and gripping his inanimate partner with grotesque eagerness, the man sweated and pranced and shuffled his way through a series, for all I know, of fox trots and tangos and fandangos and pasodobles, intently twitching and nuzzling his puppet to the movement of the music, his eyes always sealed. There was something dire going on—something that went beyond the desperation, intently twitching and nuzzling his puppet to the movement of the music, his eyes always sealed. Passers-by stopped and gawked. There was something dire going on – something discernable on the man’s damp features, beyond even the sexual perverseness of his routine. The puppet had something to do with it. Her hands and feet were bound to her masters. She wore a short lewd black skirt and her hair was black and unruly in the manner of a cartoon gypsy girl. Crude features had been inscribed on her face, and this gave her a blank, bottomless look. Although bodily responsive to her consort’s prompting – when he placed his hand on her rump she gave a spasm of ecstasy – her countenance remained a fog. Its vacancy was unanswerable, endless; and yet this man was nakedly in thrall to her.
Much of this is good, enviably good, but my memory of the passage was that it was better. My memory had retained the image of the dancer bound to his puppet, and of the ruined Escher-like stage that framed it. What my memory, also, did was censor its more obviously ‘telling’ phrases, its over-explanatory adjectives, and the way it picks on the real and the specific but then, too ardently and noisily, wants us to notice - even more - the abstract ideas they illustrate. I thought I would edit it again, and see the effect:
Throngs climbed and descended the passages like Esher’s tramping figures. High-wattage bulbs hung from the low girders, and temporary partitions and wooden platforms and posted handwritten directions signalled that around us the process of construction or ruination was being undertaken. Seemingly ever-present, in one of the station’s principal caverns, a little man danced with a life-sized dummy. Dressed in black and gripping his inanimate partner with grotesque eagerness, the man sweated and pranced and shuffled his way through a series of fox trots and tangos and fandangos and pasodobles, intently twitching and nuzzling his puppet to the movement of the music, his eyes always sealed. Passers-by stopped and gawked. Her hands and feet were bound to her masters. She wore a short lewd black skirt and her hair was black and unruly as a cartoon gypsy girl’s. Crude features inscribed on her face gave her a blank, bottomless look. Although responsive to her consort’s prompting – when he placed his hand on her rump she gave a spasm of ecstasy – her countenance remained a fog. Its vacancy was unanswerable, endless; and yet this man was nakedly in thrall to her.
If you shake the prose, words fall away and show themselves as redundant or preachy. While the state of the subway station suggests the greater ruination and re-construction of New York at that time,
unfathomable and catastrophic means that this state is nailed noisily down for the reader and there is nothing to intuit. This makes a reader a passive recipient of information, either grateful or frustrated, but definitely the latter as the prose continues in this way throughout the novel. The narrator too often tells us what we must think, what the detail imports and the reader can only nod, a witness and not the shared maker of insight.
He forgets that the reader is not one of the passer-bys who 'stand and gawk; the reader looks wisely and without the need of so much overt instruction as to what that looking yields. For example, he has to tell us that the detail of the man dancing with the puppet only
heightened the atmosphere (of) the ever-present spectacle, instead of letting the detail do its work of heightening without the narrator’s dulling drum roll. And was the dancer, really,
ever-present, or did he seem so? One answer is an exaggeration and untrue; the other answer is precise and, better suggests that this is how the world is speaking to him, nagging at him even.
To be dressed in black suggests the dancer is dressed
entirely in black: nouns and verbs rarely go lonely in O’Neill’s prose. As Gore Vidal once asked, and with less justice, of Updike's prose: might he have allowed one blind noun to slip free of its seeing-eye adjective?
And might direness, economic and artistic despair and sexual perversity be implicit in the description? Might we gleam and treasure for ourselves without being told that
something dire going on—something that went beyond... desperation? Might we feel clever making that connection and so become more deeply involved in the novel’s workings? Might the reader make such intelligent wonderings without this digging in the ribs? Aren’t we paying attention enough? Or is attention all that is being asked of us - to attend to the intelligence of the detail and, more so, as we will miss it otherwise, the intelligence that explains it for us, too?
Most often what I cut were the adjectives that were redundant or thundered their meaning, as if the nouns were too small-voiced to speak, the adverbs that would not let a verb go about its doing unaided, and, mostly, phrases that ached and groaned, not wanting any connotation to go unheralded. With less to precede it, the last sentence, the doll's face,
Its vacancy was unanswerable, endless; and yet this man was nakedly in thrall to her ends the paragraph both more grandly and more movingly. This higher diction, then, seems more earned and more impactful, a crescendo that slowly rises out of the prose rather than competing with the noise of every sentence as it was hammered out on the keyboard.
Zadie Smith in
NYRB praised O'Neill's skill, but asked if he did his job too well.
In its quest for the perfectly wrought image... fiction like Netherland is inauthentic because life consists of so much simulacra and confusion…
How successful is the prose that must so fequently distrust its own effects? It is this that makes the fiction ring falsely, although there are many accomplished instances, such as this one noted in his review by
James Wood
Around the clock, ambulances sped eastward on West Twenty-third Street with a sobbing escort of police motorcycles. Sometimes I confused the cries of the sirens with my son’s nighttime cries. I would leap out of bed and go to his bedroom and helplessly kiss him. . . . Afterward I slipped out onto the balcony and stood there like a sentry. The pallor of the so-called hours of darkness was remarkable. Directly to the north of the hotel, a succession of cross streets glowed as if each held a dawn. The taillights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit storefronts, the orange fuzz of the street lanterns: all this garbage of light had been refined into a radiant atmosphere that rested in a low silver heap over Midtown and introduced to my mind the mad thought that the final twilight was upon New York.
'This is attentive, rich prose' continues Woods, 'about New York in crisis that, refreshingly, is not also prose in crisis: it’s not overwrought or solipsistic or puerile or sentimental, or otherwise straining to be noticed. A steady hand and a good ear are required to dare the paradox of “all this garbage of light,” in which the noticer is both enraptured and faintly alienated, and which accurately tracks the forked European perspective of the novel’s narrator. The eye that sees the “orange fuzz” of the street lights is the eye that, elsewhere in the novel, alights on the “molten progress of the news tickers” in Times Square, the “train-infested underpants” of Hans’s little boy, “a necklace’s gold drool,” “the roving black blooms of four-dollar umbrellas,” and which sees, in one lovely swipe of a sentence, a sunset like this: “The day, a pink smear above America, had all but disappeared.”
But the scene in the subway is an example of a prose that is overwrought - it 'tells' more than it needs; it is solipsistic in that it distrusts the reader: there is something 'off' in the way it addresses us; and, while not puerile, it is sentimental, so pronounced in its intentions that it recalls Salinger's definition, in
Franny and Zoey, of sentimentality: it gives a thing more tenderness than God would give it. It is the reverse of the prose sampled from
Kenneth Gangemi’s Olt.
Zadie Smith in her NYRB essay acknowledges the fine descriptions that work, but Smith’s essay is worth reading for its wider concerns, and the strong suggestion that
Netherland stands for what a literary novel is these days, and that habit, market forces, and, with them, a general lack of adventurousness has made the literary novel formulaic.
Netherland may well conform to the present formula: high diction, high concept, well-connected fiction, troubling in its themes, perhaps, but not its handling, formally tuneful but bland, something most of us can hum.
In O’Neill’s novel, the narrator, we are told, is Dutch and speaks English with ‘a clunking lexical precision’. He has to take a driving test to gain a US Licence. I remember my own driving tests – there were more than several – and how I learned to pass only after I was given two pieces of advice; the first was not to fluster, explain or apologise - just sit and drive; and the second was to do so with great deliberation: don’t just look in the mirror, but make a conscious show of
looking in the mirror. This sequence feels akin to the writing in
Netherland: a conscious and deliberate series of mirror-signal-manoeuvres. I don’t think he fails the test at all. I’m just not quite happy being a passenger, but I am staying for the journey while wanting most to lose myself as I gaze out of the car window and hoping not to have keep attending the driver as he tells me how and why he is changing gear, turning left, slowing down or how we are getting there and how I will feel when I do.
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