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Before you read the book:
I love this time of year! While there are good books to read all year round, I can’t think of another time of year when more people are focused on the same batch of good (well, often good) books. The collective energy is invigorating! Plus, I always find books I never would have looked at otherwise. Here is a prime example: I would never have read Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) if it weren’t for the 2008 Man Booker longlist (we’ll see if it makes the shortlist on September 9). To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether to tackle this book before it proved itself a bit more by making the shortlist – the cover looks a bit too much like the cover of those loud and, to me, unappealing books that have been all over the bookstores lately, the ones that think a clever (but often vacuous) conceit is enough to substantiate an entire novel. From the cover and the book description on my copy, I expected a self-agrandizing, pretentious first novel that really only reiterated what others have already said and said better (and that even others have already tried to imitate and have imitated poorly), confusing clever and often base logorrhea with real substance.
I admit it: I looked for reasons to be bothered by The White Tiger‘s inclusion on the 2008 Man Booker longlist:
(1) I went in expecting the first-person narrative/comic style to be too reminiscent of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children;
(2) I thought it was just another Booker book about the caste system in India;
(3) I assumed it might be all comedy and no substance, in other words, just a witty voice spewing a lot of nothingness;
(4) well, I didn’t get to number four – the book didn’t really let me find anything else and quickly erased my three previous gripes.
Within just a few pages I felt lucky to have gotten my hands on The White Tiger. Sure, sometimes the first-person, comical narrator brings back memories of Saleem Sinai, but to say The White Tiger isn’t unique and intriguing in its own right would be unfair and downright wrong: I don’t think Adiga owes a dime to Rushdie. And the Indian caste system? It’s there too, but here the caste system isn’t an overt subject – it’s part of the setting, and, therefore, Adiga’s dealings with it are much more subversive. The comedy is also all over the place, but it is original and filled with biting substance: “Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.” And it’s hardly all comic: throughout the book are passages of melancholy and pain, sometimes lacing the comedy, sometimes overwhelming it, always smoothly integrated. Here is an example of the change in tone from the first few pages when the narrator tells about his mother’s death and funeral:
My mother’s body had been wrapped from head to toe in a saffron silk cloth, which was covered in rose petals and jasmine garlands. I don’t think she had ever had such a fine thing to wear in her life. (Her death was so grand that I knew, all at once, that her life must have been miserable. My family was guilty about something.)
Okay, so now you know that my preconceptions of the book were disposed of quickly, but what is the book about? The book is composed of the narrator’s letters to “His Excellency Wen Jiabao” who hails from Beijing, “Capital of the Freedom-loving Nation of China.” Jiabao is planning to visit Bangalore the next week, so our narrator takes it upon himself to spend the next seven nights writing to him about “the truth about Bangalore” by telling Jiabao about his own emergence. This self-reflecting story the narrator tells is a mesmerizing look at India’s tiger economy.
The narrator considers himself a great Indian entrepreneur (“My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time”). He’s raised himself from the depths of the caste system and landed . . . well, we don’t know where he’s landed as the book begins. What we do find out in the first couple of pages, however, is that he has murdered his employer (whom he still respects and defends) and has been eluding the police in “the Light.” From underneath an ominous chandelier, he writes these letters about his past on a new silver Macintosh, showing Jiaboa what he knows about India.
Please understand, Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well off. But the river brings darkness to India – the black river.
Each episode the narrator lays out in a letter is compelling and interesting and entertaining. The cast of characters is small and idiosyncratic and well developed. I don’t want to say much more than that because a lot of the fun is in discovering how the story moves on from the first few pages to the ending.
However, in a note about style: another reason I fell quickly behind this book is its simple and subtle narrative technique of having so much going on inside the character’s head that does not match what is going on outside. For example, this character speaks with such confidence in his letters to Jiabao about all matters. But when we stop to consider what he does, driving cars silently all day, fully living up to his employers’ expectations that he be a simpleton:
A sharp blow landed on my head.
I looked up and saw the Stork, with his palm still raised over my skull, glaring at me.
“Know what that was for?”
“Yes, sir,” I said – with a big smile on my face.
“Good.”
A minute later he hit me on the head again.
“Tell him what it was for, Father. I don’t think he knows. Fellow, you’re pressing too hard. You’re too excited. Father is getting annoyed. Slow down.”
“Yes, sir.”
The narrator is frequently found smiling dumbly, accepting his role and his master’s beneficence. But, obviously, there is a lot is going on below the surface. This device reminded me somewhat of the setup of The Remains of the Day: It was done well here too, but here too, I don’t think Adiga owes anything to Ishiguro.
Don’t mistake this for charm, though. This is a pretty brutal book, and not all of it is between the lines.
Other stylistict strengths, the book has nice balance and pacing. As I mentioned earlier, the comedy doesn’t overwhelm and neither does the melancholy. It is incredibly well balanced and textured. Also, the story itself moves smoothly. Though it is obvious the narrator is holding back in order to keep us reading, it never feels like an authorial ploy (which it often did even in Midnight’s Children): what the narrator is saying at the moment is interesting and important and in place. We know we’ll get to the other stuff in due time and are willing to wait while the foundation is being set up. In fact, I was enjoying the setup so much, I wasn’t sure I wanted to get to the end.
So for me The White Tiger definitely deserves its spot on the longlist and, comparing it to prior shortlists, merits a spot on the shortlist too. I feel the Booker race is off to a great start this year. I have thoroughly enjoyed The White Tiger and Netherland (the only other one I’ve read so far : ) ).
After you read the book:
Since I assume many people will be reading this book over the next few months, I don’t want to tempt anyone to spoil it for him- or herself by discussing the ending here in the main post. However, I would very much like to engage in such a discussion in the comments. Please just mark the top of your comment “spoiler.”
Before you read the book:
For anyone looking to read the next Pulitzer’s front-runner, this is your best shot so far (at least of the books that have come up on my radar – please recommend contenders if you’ve found others). An interesting and entertaining (and pleasantly detailed) rumination on cricket in the United States, a contemporary variation on The Great Gatsby, probably the most convincing and nuanced post-9/11 novel I’ve read, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) is the best new book I’ve read in the last few years.
But wait! I don’t want to oversell the book (too late?). I think I benefitted by reading The Asylum’s didn’t-love-it review, and I think that helped me go into this book with lower expectations – an amazing way to approach a book! So before even running through the elements of the plot, let me disclose a few of the things that stood out as less than “masterful.” Stylistically, there was this line:
A bell for the benefit of the blind burped at intervals as I rose.
This glaring alliteration calls attention to a line that says nothing, nothing even close to, important. Thankfully, such mediocre – or rather, less than mediocre – attempts at poetic prose are otherwise practically absent. Another annoyance was the wife’s conclusory manner of stating her political views in her quick jabs; they felt like they were in the book just to present some righteous anger toward the United States or toward her husband - she was just too eager that it felt unnatural at times, like she was writing a column rather than having a conversation over the phone with her husband. But that too didn’t stop me from really enjoying the book. So now, on to some of the reasons I loved it.
Much has been said in reviews about Netherland‘s being informed by (or relying on) The Great Gatsby, that great American novel that summed up the 1920s and cast an unflattering light on the American Dream. The final page of Gatsby looks back to the settlement of New York by the Dutch and perhaps can be seen by a Dutch writer (O’Neill was primarily raised in Holland) as an invitation to compose an up-to-date perspective.
And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world.
Here the Nick Carraway, the self-reflecting narrator telling a bigger story than his own, is Hans van den Broek, a Dutchman who has moved with his English wife to New York. The Gatsby, the aspiring (or deluded) object of affection, is Chuck Ramkissoon, an imigrant from Trinidad. Daisy Buchanan is invoked as a plan to build a cricket field that will reorient Americans to the world’s civilized sport – and rake in a lot of money.
A sports arena for the greatest cricket teams in the world. Twelve exhibition matches every summer, watched by eight thousand spectators at fifty dollars a pop. I’m talking about advertising, I’m talking about year-round consumption of food and drink in the bar-restaurant. You’re going to have a clubhouse. Two thousand members at one thousand dollars a year plus initiation fee.
The period being summed up in Netherland is the five years after the World Trade Center fell. The fear (rational? irrational?) that followed 9/11 is present in all of the pages of Netherland, yet it is sometimes subtle and, even when it is not so subtle, almost always indirect:
Our hotel apartment had two bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a view of the tip of the Empire State Building. It also had extraordinary acoustics: in the hush of the small hours, a goods truck smashing into a pothole sounded like an explosion, and the fantastic howl of a passing motorbike once caused Rachel to vomit with terror.
Netherland doesn’t take all its cues from The Great Gatsby – in fact, throughout it impressively avoids feeling contrived and stays fresh. The narrator’s main story line is his relationship with his wife, Rachel, and their son following the attacks on the World Trade Center. Before the attacks, they lived in Tribeca, but after the attacks they moved to seemingly safer Midtown (to that hotel apartment mentioned above). Soon, Rachel cannot stand living in New York any longer, and this is an excellent excuse to separate from Hans, so she and their son move to London following the attacks.
What follows is a great story that follows two major story lines: Hans’s relationship with Chuck and the future of American cricket, and Hans’s relationship with his distant wife and child and their future as a family. All of this cast in a post-9/11 atmosphere that felt very real. Despite this, the main event in this novel is not 9/11; it is just the backdrop. It was nice to read a post-9/11 novel that is focused on the effects of 9/11 but that did it in such a way that provides at least a modicum of perspective.
Besides Gatsby, Netherland also called to remembrance that great essay “Here is New York” (1949) by E.B. White. White’s essay evokes nostalgia for a lost New York as White roams the city’s streets, describing in his superbly simple yet elegant style the essence of New York City. This essay was written soon after the United States used the atomic bomb on Japan, thus the essay also looks forward ominously - and since 9/11, presciently – to destruction visiting the City:
A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
Even though Manhattan was not destroyed by the terrorist attacks, that was the closest thing to destruction from external forces the city has known. O’Neill seems to be picking up where White left off, describing in excellent prose the state of New York City at street level since the attacks. There’s nostalgia and pain, exacerbated by the absence of Hans’s wife and child and somewhat allayed by the prospect of a cricket field. All of these elements are intricately drawn, and there is a lot there to be studied and thought about in future readings. O’Neill is a very talented writer, and somehow he made me recognize feelings I didn’t know I felt.
At this point it is hard to know whether this book will stick to my mind once I’ve got some distance from it. So will it become a classic post-9/11 novel? When I finished it down I thought it could. But maybe after a few days and a few books have passed by – not to mention more time since the period it sums up - I will not remember that I once spent a lovely time wandering around New York thinking about what cricket could do to that terrific city. I hope that is not the case.
After you read the book:
The last sentence in White’s ”Here is New York” is one of those superb moments in literature, when a great insightful piece is concluded with style and substance that makes the reader think for decades to come. Here White is talking about an old, battered willow tree:
In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, i think: “This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.” If it were to go, all would go – this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.
I cannot be sure, but it sure seems like O’Neill had this very passage in his mind when he wrote the last page of Netherland. Remember:
You only had to look at our faces.
Which makes me remember my mother. I remember how I turned and caught her – how could I have forgotten this until now? – looking not at New York but at me, and smiling.
Which is how I come to face my family with the same smile.
There is a lot of hope in this last passage of Netherland, and it seems to be invoking the “marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death” moment in White’s essay. Some might think it is a bit too hopeful an ending for an otherwise ambivalent story. But I didn’t feel that way. This hope is subverted by Chuck’s death. I’d like some time to reflect on how to reconcile the ending with Chuck’s ending.
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