A review in the New York Times Book Review and one by James Wood in the New Yorker, both brimming with superlatives, propelled me toward Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland earlier this spring. The book immediately became the foremost pleasure of the two weeks during which I read it. In the mornings and afternoons, I walked to my train with added briskness; on even short ventures from the apartment, I jammed the book into my too-small purse. I enjoyed it a lot.
I did not so much enjoy the blurb it received from Jonathan Safran Foer:
“New York is not what most people imagine it to be. Just as marriage, family, friendship, and manhood are not. Netherland is suspenseful, artful, psychologically pitch perfect, and a wonderful read. But more than any of that, it’s revelatory. Joseph O’Neill has managed to paint the most famous city in the world, and the most familiar concept in the world (love), in an entirely new way.”
Blurbing a book really brings out the worst in some people. Why not let the last sentence stand? Or, if that seemed too skimpy (I would call it concise), begin with the third? The smug first two sentences don’t do the book any favors. Buy this book, dear reader, and have your gross misconceptions about New York and life in general corrected! Fun.
The book can carry its own water, anyway. Written with exacting precision in the staid, somber voice of a Dutch-born London banker working in Manhattan after 9/11, it tells how he is assimilated into immigrant life in America via the cricket fields tucked away in many a corner of New York and environs. With his half-estranged wife back in London with their son, he becomes fascinated with a mysterious acquaintance from cricket, Chuck Ramkissoon, playing Nick to Ramkissoon’s Gatsby.
The book holds you at a bit of a distance. I didn’t warm up to it or its characters, but I clamored for more and more of its delicately structured sentences and paragraphs. They seemed decadent and nourishing at the same time, and they did as much as anything else in the book to delineate the main character. Here he is remembering his uneasiness during his last visit to his mother’s home, a month before her unforeseen death:

I stood at the window, waiting for the next arrival of light. The lighthouse had been mesmeric to my boy self. He was an only child and it must be that at night he habitually stood at his bedroom window alone; but my recollection of watching the light travel out of Scheveningen contained the figure of my mother at my side, helping me to look out into the dark. She answered my questions. The sea was the North Sea. It was filled with shops queuing for entry to Rotterdam. Rotterdam was the biggest port in the world. The breakwaters were perpendicular to the beach and stopped the beach from being washed away. The jellyfish in the water might sting you. The blue of the jellyfish was the color indigo. Seven particular stars made the outline of a plow. When you died, you went to sleep.

And:

Some people have no difficulty in identifying with their younger incarnations: Rachel, for example, will refer to episodes from her childhood or college days as if they’d happened to her that very morning. I, however, seem given to self-estrangement. I find it hard to muster oneness with those fomer selves whose accidents and endeavors have shaped who I am now. The schoolboy at the Gymnasium Haganum; the Leiden student; the clueless trainee executive at Shell; the analyst in London; even the thirty-year-old who flew to New York with his excited young wife: my natural sense is that all are faded, by the by, discontinued.

Gatsby is the obvious precursor for Netherland, but there’s something of Henry James’s Lambert Strether in Hans, too. His choice is different and many of the circumstances reversed in a resolutely post-Victorian world, but the novel does have a few moral disillusionments in store for him on a similar scale. But then again, I may be stretching the case–this may just be one of those books that has a way of evoking all the major landmarks in one’s reading history.

“I think it’s good to admit what a wolfish thing art is; I trust writers who know they aren’t nice.”
Kay Ryan

My neighborhood is at its best this time of year. A hundred kinds of flowers are in bloom, but the lilac bushes that edge the front of my U-shaped courtyard building establish precedence, sending their perfume back into the further reaches of the long courtyard and through an only slightly cracked window (it’s been cool out) to scent my living room. It’s lovely, though of course it’s a decisively urban form of natural beauty: cultivated, tended, counting on the contrast with brick and pavement for much of its effect.
At times like these, when I’m most attuned to natural world with its circumscribed but still affecting role in my citified life, I wonder: WWGWD? What was Gilbert White doing, 275 years ago in the English village of Selborne and environs, at this time of the year? What was he observing and recording, what variations was he finding in the seasonal rhythm from year to year? If you’ve been reading “About Last Night” for a while, you know that I turn to White every once in a while for the wonders he recorded, for his dogged observation and sharp discernment, for the way he puts the humble human scale in perspective by telling us tinier stories about tinier worlds, and for the poetic economy with which he expresses all of this. Here are sccenes from May.

May 23 to June 3, 1772. [Ringmer] Wryneck pipes. The Ringmer-tortoise came forth from it’s hybernaculum on the 6th of April, but did not appear to eat ’til May the 5th: it does not eat but on hot days. As far as I could find it has no perceptible pulse. The mole-cricket seems to chur all night.
May 20, 1774. Flycatcher appears: the latest summer-bird of passage. The stoparola is most punctual to the 20th of May!!! This bird, which comes so late, begins building immediately.
May 19, 1775. No chafers appear as yet: in those seasons that they abound they deface the foliage of the whole country, especially on the downs, where woods & hedges are scarce. Regulus non cristatus stridet voce locustulae [wood wren]: this bird, the latest and largest willow-wren, haunts the tops of the tallest woods, making a stammering noise at intervals, & shivering with it’s wings. Bank-martins abound over the ponds in the forest: swifts seldom appear in cold, black days round the church.
May 21. Mr. Yalden’s tank is dry.
May 23. Dutch -honeysuckles in fine bloom.
May 24. Thrushes now, during this long drought, for want of worms hunt-out shell-snails, & pick them to pieces for their young. My horses begin to lie abroad.
May 24, 1776. [Winton] Cold dew, hot sun, soft even.
May 22, 1779. Nightingales have eggs. They build a very inartificial nest with dead leaves. & dry stalks. Their eggs are of a dull olive colour. A boy took my nest with five eggs: but the cock continues to sing: so probably they will build again.
May 24. Fiery lily bows: orange lily blows.
May 26. The nightingale continues to sing; & therefore is probably building again.
May 28. Young pheasants!
May 14, 1782. Tortoise eats the leaves of poppies.
May 15, 1784. The tortoise is very earnest for the leaves of poppies, which he hunts about after, & seems to prefer to any other green thing. Such is the vicissitude of matters where weather is concerned, that the spring, which last year was unusually backward, is now forward.
May 16. Sultry. Left off fires in the parlor. So much sun hurries the flowers out of bloom. Flesh-flies begin to appear.
May 19. Flowers fade, & go-off very fast thro’ heat. There has been only one moderate shower all this month. Bees thrive. Asparagus abounds.

I previously excerpted White’s journals here and here.

My question about the Jane Chord is whether one is permitted, in the many cases in which a book begins with an article, to append the word that follows. I bet Terry’s answer is a gentle no, dear. But how much more fertile the ground of my personal library if this small cheat is granted. To wit:

The Turn of the Screw: “The story stopped.”

If you’re familiar with the particular way Henry James frames his ambiguous tale, or even just with the tale’s central ambiguity, that should give you all the frisson of a coded message arrived from beyond the grave.
What about other James? Doesn’t he just strike you as the kind of writer who would have planted such bonus meaning, in full consciousness of what he was doing? Indeed, a stroll through the corpus turns up a few beauties.

The Awkward Age: “Save tomorrow.”
The Bostonians: “Olive shed.” (!)
The Ambassadors: “Strether’s Strether.” (!!)
James’s memoir of his childhood, A Small Boy and Others: “In gap.”

Somewhere he’s chuckling, I tell you.
E. M. Forster’s epigraph to Howards End famously tells us to “Only connect”; his Jane Chord underlines the sentiment with “One never.” George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda yields the uplifting “Men noble,” while the constitutionally beclouded Thomas Hardy, in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, gives us an “On” to begin and an “on” to end; they beg for an “and” to connect them, or at least a suggestive comma.
I wish I could find my latest copy of Transit of Venus–a book that metes out its secrets as artfully as any, and that I’m certain holds some I haven’t discovered yet. But I’m forever giving that book away. Anyone?

There’s a lot that’s amazing about Henry Green’s novel Loving, which I continue to read in small doses. I pick it up infrequently enough that my grasp of many plot points is less than firm, but no matter. The draw is Green’s minute observation and inimitable style. Rendering the teeming emotional and social life below stairs on an Irish estate during the second world war, Green goes right to the verge of sensuous overload in his impressionistic descriptions but pulls back in his plainspoken, practical dialogue. In a way his characters’ talk functions itself as description or atmosphere–doggedly true to the way he heard people talk, it’s not meant to explain anything and in fact often serves to obfuscate the matter.
In this terribly moving small vignette from the novel, I’m interested in how colors run a little wild. To say they have symbolic weight is an understatement; more than symbolic, they’re active players in the miniature drama that plays out here, seeming to struggle with each other for supremacy over the mood of the scene and ergo its outcome.

Edith feared for Raunce’s neck. She said those draughts in the servant’s hall might harm him. Now coal was so short it was only a small peat fire she could lay each morning in the butler’s room, and she insisted that the grate Raunce had was too narrow for peat. This no doubt could be her excuse to get him to take his cup along with her to one of the living rooms where huge fires were kept stoked all day to condition the old masters.
So it came about next afternoon that Charley and Edith had drawn up deep leather armchairs of purple in the Red Library. A ledge of more purple leather on the fender supported Raunce’s heels next his you-and-me in a gold Worcester cup and saucer. Pointed french windows were open onto the lawn about which peacocks stood pat in the dry as though enchanted. A light summer air played in from over massed geraniums, toyed with Edith’s curls a trifle. Between the books the walls were covered cool in green silk. But she seemed to have no thought to the draught.
“You ever noticed that little place this side of the East Gate?” he was asking.
“Well can’t say I’ve looked over it if that’s what you’re after,” she replied. He hooked a finger into the bandage round his throat as though to ease himself.
“Next time you pass that way you have a look, see.”
“Why Charley?”
“It’s empty that’s why.”
“It’s empty is it?” she echoed dull but with a sharp glance.
“The married butlers used to live there at one time,” he explained. Then he lied. “Yesterday mornin’,” he went on canny, “Michael stopped me as he came out of the kitchen. You’ll never guess what he was onto.”
“Not something for one of his family again?” she enquired.
“That’s right,” he said. “It was only he’s goin’ to ask Mrs. T. for it when she gets back, that’s all. The roof of their pig sty of a hovel ‘as gone an’ fallen on ‘is blessed sister-in-law’s head and’s crushed a finger of one of their kids.”
“The cheek,” she exclaimed.
“A horrid liar the man is,” Charley commented. “But it’s not the truth that matters. It’s what’s believed,” he added.
“You think she’ll credit such a tale?” Edith wanted to know.
“Now love,” he began then paused. He was dressed in black trousers and a stiff shirt with no jacket, the only colour being in his footman’s livery waistcoat of pink and white stripes. He wore no collar on account of his neck. Lying back he squinted into the blushing rose of that huge turf fire as it glowed, his bluer eye azure on which was a crescent rose reflection. “Love,” he went on toneless, “what about you an’ me getting married? There I’ve said it.”
“That’s want thinking over Charley,” she replied at once. Her eyes left his face and with what seemed a quadrupling in depth came following his to rest on those rectangles of warmth alive like blood. From this peat light her great eyes became invested with rose incandescence that was soft and soft and soft.
“There’s none of this love nonsense,” he began again appearing to strain so as not to look at her. “It’s logical dear that’s what. You see I thought to get my old mother over out of the bombers.”
“And quite right too,” she answered prompt.
“I’m glad you see it my way,” he took her up. “Oh honey you don’t know what that means.”
“I’ve always said a wife that can’t make a home for her man’s mother doesn’t merit a place of her own,” she announced gentle.
“Then you don’t say no?” he asked glancing her way at last. His white face was shot with green from the lawn.
“I haven’t said yes have I?” she countered and looked straight at him, her heart opening about her lips. Seated as she was back to the light he could see only a blinding space for her head framed in dark hair and inhabited by those great eyes on her, fathoms deep.
“No that’s right,” he murmured obviously lost.

In the introduction to my edition (which is the same one linked above), John Updike points to Green’s “love of work and laughter; his absolute empathy; his sense of splendour amid loss, of vitality within weakness” and points to a further contradiction: “with upper-class obliquity he champions the demotic in language and in everything.”

Consider yourselves warned: this is not a post about the arts, but one of those occasional yet inevitable posts about the life of the blogger that are delightful to some and obnoxious to others. Proceed or click away accordingly.
My absence from this space recently, excepting the occasional fortune cookie, can be explained in two short words: work and hockey. Behind these words lie a very boring story and a semi-interesting one. The first goes like this: work is busy. I know you know all about it. The second? I think it’s pretty cool, actually. I haven’t trotted out this particular obsession for a matter of years, maybe, but longtime readers will remember that alongside the interests that brought me here, interests in books, movies, criticism, and to a more limited extent the performing arts, stands a less elevated but equally passionate love for ice hockey–for the professional variety, from a strictly spectatorial perspective. Until recently.
The more hockey I watched over the years, the more a question or possibility gnawed at me: what does it feel like–to fly across the ice like that, to deliver a pass or receive one, to shoot and, in my very wildest dreams, score? Until a couple of years ago, the question seemed purely theoretical and made me increasingly melancholy. I was on the far side of 35 and I didn’t know how to ice-skate, let alone do things with pucks. Even if I learned some of this, somehow acquiring skates and the bulky, mysterious-to-me carapace of a hockey player, and finding ice to play on and other people to play with who would not laugh me off said ice–even if I overcame all of these obstacles, I would certainly never be capable of performing any of the highly-skilled on-ice feats that most piqued this niggling desire to capture a feeling. There was perhaps a remote possibility that I could pursue this, but no question that anything transcendently gorgeous would always be beyond my grasp. So why bother? It would have to be more frustrating than gratifying, right?
(Speaking of ungraspable beauty in hockey, the nonpareil hockey blogger E, who runs A Theory of Ice, once posted a great little paragraph by William Faulkner on first witnessing this strange northern game. Read the whole thing here, but a bit of it goes like this: “it seemed discorded and inconsequent, bizarre and paradoxical like the frantic darting of the weightless bugs which run on the surface of stagnant pools. Then it would break, coalesce through a kind of kaleidoscopic whirl like a child’s toy, into a pattern, a design almost beautiful….”)
Something had to happen to change my mind. And, as with many consequential and fortunate turning points in my life, the difference was made by my dad. At the age of 64, just after Christmas, he went out and bought new skates, suited up, and took to the ice for the first time in about four decades. True, he had years of real, competitive experience as a teenager and young man. But he also was almost thirty years older than me. Part of me was envious, part inspired. By March I had new skates too and was enrolled in beginning figure-skating lessons in a fairly distant suburb. I made the 45-minute drive every Monday evening, right after work, spent half an hour on the ice, and turned around to head back. Behind-wheel to on-ice ratio: 3 to 1, but worth it. I learned some basic skating that would help later, and some kid-level figure-skating stuff that wouldn’t. I earned a turquoise ribbon with a penguin on it certifying my mastery of 1/2 level of skating expertise.
This was all extremely exciting, but it didn’t feel like it was getting me much closer to playing hockey.
I kept skating wistfully, trying to work diligently on my stride and my backwards with dim hope of someday, somehow, getting a stick and a game. And this winter, wouldn’t you know, the stars aligned and I found myself becoming friends with someone whose friend was about to begin teaching a beginner’s hockey class. By now I’ve had maybe ten lessons. I am entirely incompetent and thoroughly addicted.
Some amateur observations:
• Many things in ice-skating are easier with a stick in your hands and an urgent purpose.
• Stopping is not one of those things. Did you ever see a lot of beginning skaters play a hockey scrimmage? Everyone goes into big loops or dire spin-o-ramas to get to the puck facing in the right direction. I can’t imagine it’s not very funny to observe. “Frantic darting of the weightless bugs” indeed.
• No matter how wretchedly you play, the hunger to get the puck is all-consuming. In my case, the need to get rid of it once I have it is equally urgent. One-half of this attitude needs changing.
• Playing hockey means developing a deeper relationship with velcro.
• A one-minute shift in scrimmage is almost enough to kill me.
But most of all: I love this game and already can’t imagine life without it, even though I clearly will never be any good at any part of it and what I’m doing is to the real thing what fingerpainting is to Frankenthaler. I remind myself, in fact, a bit of Terry when he finally put paint to canvas a few years ago, after years of wondering what it felt like: “It was, as I’d hoped, completely absorbing fun, and though I fear I have no obvious aptitude for the making of visual art, I still can’t wait to do it again.”

I was completely won over by Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit. Unassuming but quietly wise, this little movie from Israel and France appears to have come and gone from New York already, but it opened in Chicago last weekend and one can hope it is playing in other cities now as well. If you get a chance to see it, don’t miss out.

Eight Egyptian policemen, who comprise the Alexandria Police Ceremonial Orchestra, travel to Israel to perform at the opening of an Israeli-Arab cultural center. The opening scenes find them negotiating with difficulty but with dignity the challenges of a foreign airport, identically dressed in stately powder-blue uniforms. In the movie’s signature image, they stand in a row in an empty landscape, waiting. Each carries a standard black suitcase and his instrument, from a large, curvy double bass case to a small, boxy clarinet case with many sizes and shapes in between. The dry comedy of this image–a little reminiscent, to me, of a William Booth cartoon–characterizes a good deal of the movie, in which the band gets lost on the way to their concert in a sort of fortuitous, or at least adventurous, detour.

The movie has its somber side, too, leavened but not dissolved by the gentle humor it finds in simply observing, with a certain patience, human behavior. There’s much to be said about the delicacy with which it probes relationships, especially the particular intimacy that can take hold between two people who were strangers yesterday. But that’s better experienced by you than broken down by me, and there’s something else that I want to point to here: the film’s capacious view of what it is to be an artist.

The men in the Alexandria Police Ceremonial Orchestra–which their leader, Tawfiq, refers to by its full name almost without exception–are a staid and well-ordered bunch. They are, after all, policemen. You might not see them, at first blush, as true artists. They’re a far cry from being free spirits. But as the unfolding plot reveals–and the joyous last scene, in which they play gloriously for a crowd of delighted faces, confirms–they’re most serious and passionate musicians underneath the regalia. Even that’s not quite right, though: the very point is that they’re serious and passionate musicians in their regalia. Their vocation and avocation aren’t separate. Early in the movie, the incongruity of “Alexandria Police Ceremonial Orchestra” plays for gentle laughs. By the end, “Police” and “orchestra” coexist frictionlessly–they make perfect sense together.

Also surprising is the movie’s treatment of what you might expect to be its central subject: friction between the Israeli characters and their Egyptian visitors. But political friction is not what this movie is interested in. To be sure, Kolirin acknowledges this tension in subtle, fleeting ways. But, though you’re highly attuned to its possibility as the movie begins, by the end it’s displaced by the spectrum of other, more interesting ways hosts and visitors have found to relate and react to one another.