It's not really about cricket at all

Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
New York: Pantheon Books, 2008

Right before I started reading it, I found this Wonkette description of Netherland:

Recall last summer: it was the summer of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, the most important book liked by people wearing the most important-looking glasses. It seems O’Neill has journeyed from that wire-rimmed menagerie of the psyche to Politics & Prose, where all such odysseys of the soul must, and do, eventually terminate.

And I thought to myself, that sounds about how I remember the talk about this book. And while I generally don't wear glasses (current facebook profile pic aside), I figure that since I like the sort of books those people like, it's a good thing I've finally checked this out from the library. Oh, plus, it's a 9/11 book, and I'm kinda fascinated by those. (Like this one and this one.)

But just like it's not really about cricket, it's not really about 9/11. Except it's not not about them either. It's about love and loss and rediscovering oneself. And - and this is what makes it most about 9/11, for me - it is a love story about America, and NYC specifically. What is it about America that keeps pulling people toward it? Why are we a nation of immigrants?

I found Hans a lovely and thoughtful - albeit lost - narrator. It's as though he serves almost entirely as a mirror to hold up the world and the other characters he sees. But anyway, a few of the lovelier observations from Hans:

• Even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become too small to contain my misery.
  
• Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
• I was possibly the only person contained by the apparent world who was unable to see through it.

And, finally, "my secret, almost shameful feeling is that I am out of New York - that New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin." Which reminded me of nothing so much as E.M. Cioran:

All that is not Paris being equal in my eyes, I often regret that wars have spared it. [...] I shall never forgive Paris for having bound me to space, for making me from somewhere.

Which is a lot for a city to shoulder. But if any cities can, they are NYC and Paris. And what of my City of Angels? In what ways is it so much like and unlike the others? Could a different Netherland be set here?

You can't always get what you want...

... but you just might find, you get what you need.

Shriver's The Post-Birthday World continued to delight me. It was so honest. That there are no perfect choices. That when two paths diverge in a wood, both have their merits. And we get to inspect the ramifications, on both sides, of a fateful kiss (or not).

Since I've already shared some thoughts on the book, I thought I'd just do special quotes instead.

She theorized that for everyone there was that one high you couldn't refuse, for which you'd sell your soul - and anyone else's. [...] Thus the only protection from yourself in this instance was never to try it [...] Yet here was Ramsey Acton, the one substance on earth that Irina Galina McGovern could not resist. She'd had fair warning in July, sniffed a few heady grains from a split vial, just enough to know that this was the drug that she had been avoiding her whole life.

Haven't we all felt like that? And a comment on 9/11 that is so easy to forget, and yet so true:

Much as it's worth recalling that for whole years of World War II no one knew whether Hitler might win, it would soon behoove Americans to remember that for a few hours on that eleventh of September no one knew if more plans might be out there [...] Now that the spinning globe on which we hurtle was clearly not standing still, anything could happen, and anything did

But here's a line, from a description one of Irina's children's books, that sums it all up:

Because when he looks back on his life, Martin realizes that he has spent his life doing something that he loves, and that, to him at least, is beautiful.

We don't only have one destiny. And lucky us, we get to see two of Irina's.