Hype sensitivity

It was with surprise and delight that I stumbled across a half-page news international item in last week's Observer, revealing the hullabaloo which suddenly attends Joseph O'Neill's new novel, Netherland. The New Yorker has declared it a masterpiece and comparisons with F Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow and all sorts of other American literary icons are being cast with abandon.

Now while some of these encomia are inevitably a little far-fetched, for once the hype has some substance. It is a post-9/11 novel, a literary sub-species covering the entire spectrum of metaphorical effectiveness, from Dave Eggers' depiction of wounded American pride and embitterment in You Shall Know Our Velocity to Ian McEwan's preciously imperious Saturday, a book with which I lost patience following the eighteen-page description of a game of squash between two middle-aged doctors, a passage which Proust would have found self-indulgently long-winded.

In Netherland, the role of metaphor is borne by Chuck Ramkissoon, a one-time friend and informal business associate of the narrator. He is the heart and soul of a cricketing community of ex-pats, a would-be Kerry Packer with dreams of an international cricket empire. But he is the immigrant chasing the American dream at a time when the Statue of Liberty has turned its gaze inward.

Essentially, this is the post-colonial novel transferred to a nation of immigrants, where the notion of national identity is little more than a cultural construct. The world has struggled to understand how a country whose image is largely channelled through Hollywood could choose - twice! - George W Bush as its President, but the dichotomy of America's liberal coastal cities and its fundamentalist heartland is filtered out. The country is too diverse in origins and beliefs to function as a unified whole, but the trauma of 9/11 demands a unified response. There is no single quintessential American identity, stereotype though such a definition would have to be.

The novel has a lot more to say than that, of course - there's a plot and everything - and I'm quite sure that I'm imposing my own interpretation on it, but that's a necessary part of any work of art. A novel, a painting, a play: all of these are only potential works of art until witnessed by someone other than the artist and then they become beacons for appreciation and analysis. Anyway, I exhort you to seek out Netherland for yourself.

At a lunch to celebrate its publication, Gill Coleridge, Joe's agent, explained how a desultory offer from Faber, the publisher of his first two novels, led her to offer it to Fourth Estate. Trying to sell foreign rights had been a frustrating experience, with countless European houses expressing doubt that a cricket-themed novel would find much of a readership on the continent. Once The New Yorker had passed judgment, however, the offers came flooding in.

I belatedly discovered that Coleridge is also Richard Ford's agent in the UK, which was a missed opportunity, especially as O'Neill's outsider's analysis of a nation's psyche makes a fascinating reading alongside the Frank Bascombe's gradual surrender to the realities of the American dream.

Anyway, we'll see what the Booker judges make of it. Since each new set of judges probably wants, understandably, to make its mark on Booker history with a distinctive and independent-minded choice of winner, it may be that they will want to avoid feeling corralled into choosing it. (Verb, gerund, gerundive, gerundive, participle? Urgh. Sorry.) I fervently hope though that will recognise that setting aside the hype for any book can still leave a book of considerable inherent merits.

The only books I've read so far this year which I think are worthy Booker competition are The Outcast by Sadie Jones, which I'm fervently hoping will receive its due at this week's Orange Prize ceremony, and In God's Country by Ross Raisin, a book which Joseph O'Neill's editor, Clare Reihill, was deeply disappointed to lose to Viking in auction. More to follow at a later time on those two, I think.

Customers in the shop over the last week or so seem to have been on their best behaviour on the whole, so my subconscious has thoughtfully taken it upon itself to trouble me with oneiric enquiries of its own invention. I dreamed a few nights ago that I was patiently explaining to a customer that "it's A to Z, alphabetical by author", to which my interlocutor responded, "But what about the other letters?"

I suspect it's some sort of premonition.

Hero worship

(Originally posted on 25th July 2007)

I'd been saving up Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land for a time when I'd be able to give it the unswerving attention his books deserve, but this week concluded that such an opportunity was unlikely to manifest itself any time soon and so cracked the spine on the Piccadilly Line in defiance of the unbroken ranks of Potteroos.

I've heard nothing but reverent praise about his third novel featuring Frank Bascombe, and, 200 pages in, I concur wholeheartedly. The density of cultural references makes it necessarily slow going for someone unacquainted with suburbia in the grand American style, but such a close reading gives me the chance to savour every perfectly cast sentence, to delight in what Stephen Fry calls "the chewiness of language".

In a bar, Bascombe sees a silent TV image of George Dubya on the campaign trail in 2000: "Bush's grinning, smirking, depthless face is visible, talking soundlessly, arms held away from his sides as if he was hiding tennis balls in his armpits."

The wit is coruscating; the image is indelible. And there's even something about the passage as a whole which suggests that Ford wants us consider the possibility that the tennis balls, for some maleficent purpose, might actually be there.

When he came in to the shop to sign stock last autumn, I felt a sense of awe. He has a grand presence and a measured stride. His huge hand embraces yours, his voice has an authoritative rumble, what he says is succinct and definitive.

And for perhaps the only time in my life when meeting someone with an iconic status in my eyes, I wasn't reduced to sweaty gaucheness. We spoke about the great writers of post-war America and when he'd signed his books, I managed to say what I really meant: "It's always a pleasure to meet authors, but sometimes it's just an absolute honour."

Trite and grovelling, no doubt you think, but it was utterly sincere. So, David Gilmour, if, by some bizarre happenstance, you're reading this, I can only apologise. It was a thrill to meet you, but excruciating for you, I'm sure. Still, you should have told me you were duetting with David Bowie a week later. I'd have mortgaged the cat for a ticket.