JUST NOT CRICKET IN MY BOOK

I have just read Netherland. It is very much the livre du jour, or rather the literary-novel-now-out-in-paperback du jour. I don’t generally feel any compulsion to read fashionable books, especially if I know in my bones that they aren’t going to be for me (viz Dan Brown). Who can say what leads one to read one book rather than another? The Origin of Species is now atop my pile, a little because Professor Dawkins has re-piqued my interest (I have had my Pelican edition since the 1960s) but mostly because I feel it would be “nice” to read it in its anniversary year; indeed, if I were to miss this occasion, I doubt that I would ever get around to it.

But back to Netherland. I am not unduly surprised to find that it has been absurdly over-praised. So many literary novels are hyped with a degree of desperation that beggars belief. Certainly Joseph O’Neill is an enormously intelligent writer and his command of his material and of his style are both enviable. And I liked it more than I had expected.

I was braced to be repelled. After all, it is marketed as being “about” cricket in New York. Indeed, the HarperCollins paper edition, which includes an interview with O’Neill and other sidebar material, focuses on this aspect of the book. Well, I can think of few subjects better calculated to bore me to tears than cricket and had the book featured that dreary pastime in, say, Birmingham, Perth or Mumbai, I doubt that I would have purchased a copy.

As it turns out, cricket is no more than a textural ingredient. There is a partial account of one match. And the great character of the book, the Trinidadian Chuck Ramkissoon, is ostensibly attempting to establish a proper cricket ground in Brooklyn. But cricket here is what Alfred Hitchcock used to call The McGuffin: a set-up or mechanical device that kick-starts the plot and serves as a surface attraction for getting the punters in. The main traffic of the novel concerns an unravelling and then reknitting marriage. This, at any rate, is how I read it and (though I haven’t discussed it with any of them) I bet that’s how my women friends would read it too. But this – it seems to me – foregrounded story is not even alluded to, let alone discussed, in the aforementioned interview. It is as though O’Neill has written one novel for (straight) men and another for women and for men bored to tears by cricket.

I’m perplexed that Sam Mendes is in development with a movie of Netherland. As I read it, it’s a discursive, reflective, internalised narrative, the kind that routinely defeats those who try to dramatise such novels. But of course Mendes will make the version that is “about cricket in New York” rather than the one about Hans and Rachel and their growing apart and then back together.



Perhaps this is all a measure of the novel’s excellence. Some months ago, I read another well-regarded contemporary novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. This shares much in tone and material with Netherland, depicting another immigrant highflier in Manhattan and displaying a hugely intelligent grasp of the way the various sensibilities of different nationalities rub against each other. And I found that a (woman) friend who liked the book as much as did I had read it from a very different perspective and so had a very different take on it from mine. This elusive novel too was planned for filming (by Mira Nair) but that plan appears to have been shelved.

Just as well, I think. Excellent novels deserve to be known for what they are, rather than being forever supplanted by routine movie versions. The best outcome for the writer of an exceptional novel is for a producer to pay out serious money for the rights and then make a movie so bad that it is soon forgotten. Thereafter, the novel regains its status as the only widely known work bearing that title. This is what happened to the lucky Louis de Bernières with Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, another hugely popular literary paperback.

The overhyping of novels, especially by new writers, can be quite destructive for the future of the writer so marketed. Donna Tartt has been unable to meet the expectations that The Secret History raised. Alex Garland, now evidently a fixture in the lucrative world of writing unmade movies, must miss the attention that The Beach attracted. I thought both these hit books so bad – derivative, ill-written, poorly imagined – that they made me quite disproportionately angry.

Another preposterously overpraised first novel was A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka, which critics and others fell upon as if no novel like it had been written before. I wonder how many of those fans can name either of her subsequent efforts.

Two more highly fashionable reads that I succumbed to were Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe. I dare say I enjoyed both of them very much but in all good conscience I can recall not a thing about either of them. Perhaps they indulged too many characters. So many novels, if not written by someone as smart and fecund as Dickens or Joyce, are prone to dribbling away into a crowd of nonentities. Another novel that made me cross was Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson, which I thought unfunny and incredibly sloppy. I’m assured that her headline-grabbing first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, is worth reading but I’m inclined to be once bitten, twice shy. It served me right for buying a book purely because it had a nice dog on the cover.

The fashion for writing comedically about a large cast of characters has always had its attractions for novelists but it is incredibly hard to make work. It defeated Gore Vidal in Duluth and I don’t expect writers lower down the pecking order to bring it off either.

Let me not come off here as an old curmudgeon. I can certainly think of one novel that was in every other traveller’s hands on the tube for several months back in 1986 and that, when it was in my hands, would not allow itself to be put down. The McGuffin of that book was highly unpropitious too: chemical elements. It was Primo Levi’s wonderful The Periodic Table, his first (I think) to be published in Britain but the fifth he wrote – happily all the others have followed in translation.

At the back of Netherland is Joseph O’Neill’s “Capricious XI of Favourite Books”. I always spurn favourites, “best-of”, “greatest”, “all-time tops” and other such reductive lists but simultaneously cannot resist being provoked by them. Of course as soon as I began my own capricious XI, I remembered the absurdity of it. If you arrange such a list alphabetically, most of us wouldn’t even make it out of ‘A’ before our number is up: The Age of Innocence, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, All the Pretty Horses, The Ambassadors, American Pastoral, Animal Farm, Anna Karenina, Ape and Essence, As I Lay Dying, Atonement, At Swim-Two-Birds and that’s not to mention À la recherche du temps perdu. By the time you get to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy or even Disgrace, let alone The Tin Drum or Ulysses, you are hundreds over your quota. And then what of those writers whose canon you’d want to include, never mind the horror of choosing one: Austen, Flaubert, Trollope, Zola, Dostoevsky, the Brontës, Balzac, Gaskell, Hardy, Lawrence, Wells, Maugham, Fitzgerald, Greene, Steinbeck …? How long is a string of literature?

Given that there is such a cornucopia of great books, it really doesn’t signify if a passing sensation escapes your clutches. And that doesn’t even begin to consider the vast other library of fiction, the so-called “popular” rather than literary novels: all those writers like Catherine Cookson, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Wilbur Smith, Bernard Cornwell, Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins, not one volume of whom you and I (or at any rate I) will ever have in our hands, let alone read.