(Image via New York Magazine's Vulture.)
(The conclusion of our interview with Joseph O'Neill. Tomorrow, we'll be giving away a copy of the paperback edition of Netherland.)
TEV: You described yourself as a conventional soul. How so?
Joseph O’Neill: You know, my socks match. Have I – when did I say that?
TEV: In the Telegraph piece that just ran.
Joseph O’Neill: Oh. Well, I suppose I am conventional.
TEV: Well I know I am. But I’m accused of that all the time.
Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. Who’s unconventional, in a relevant context?
TEV: I don’t know, I suppose people would say William T. Vollman is unconventional and imagine that people thought David Foster Wallace was unconventional.
Joseph O’Neill: Frankly, anyone who is a novelist is almost by definition conventional. The idea that you create a body of words, a lengthy body of words, in the hope that people will read it, is conventional.
Also, almost any novel posits all sorts of conventional binary oppositions: reader-writer, creator-consumer, eyes-page. There are all sorts of pre-set structures. So, in other words, it’s very hard for writers to be unconventional, except within the very narrow ambit of literary considerations. And even then it’s practically impossible.
TEV: Sort of conventional unconventionality?
Joseph O’Neill: I’m all in favor of the renewal of the form. I just think that the problem with ‘conventional’ is that it’s an analytically meaningless word – it’s either a specific word, meaning reliant on convention, which everybody is. Or it’s a pejorative word, which is cheap.
TEV: You seemed to be using it self-deprecatingly.
Joseph O’Neill: I can’t have been talking about myself as a writer…
TEV: No, I think it was mainly living arrangements and styles and the way one lives.
Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. I suppose I am conventional in those terms.
TEV: It’s not a pejorative term in this question.
Joseph O’Neill: Now, if someone says, “A is a conventional writer,” what you are politely saying is, “Don’t bother reading A. He or she is terribly dull.”
TEV: No originality.
Joseph O’Neill: Yeah.
TEV: How long have you lived at the Chelsea Hotel. And how have, if at all, have they reacted to being immortalized?
Joseph O’Neill: The Chelsea Hotel was immortalized long before I ever turned up.
TEV: That’s true, but they’ve gotten a new wave of attention.
Joseph O’Neill: Well if anything, I’ve mortalized it, because the hotel seems to be heading rapidly downhill. I’ve lived there since ’98, though we had an interlude in Brooklyn for a year and a half. And I love the hotel, it’s sort of a little village inside Manhattan.
TEV: Why do you think there is a resistance among young, American writers to what you have called the lyrical moment?
Joseph O’Neill: I don’t know, actually. If there is, it may be because it’s so hard to write.
TEV: So, we’re lazy?
Joseph O’Neill: No, I mean that if it were the case that everyone could write a so-called lyrical novel if they wanted to but had decided against it, then their resistance to it has authority. But is that really the case? I doubt it very much.
Take Zadie Smith, for example, who is resistant to the lyrical realist novel at the moment. I think she’s allowed to be, because she’s actually written that way in her last book, and has kind of shown that she can do it and has come away from it with reservations. She’s earned her resistance.
That said, there are a lot of critics, or readers, who don’t have a taste for so-called lyrical writing and can’t be expected to write lyrically before they voice a negative opinion about it. And again, you can’t really argue with taste. If people prefer to read something else, that’s fine.
You’ve mentioned this resistance of younger Americans, who are you thinking of, in particular?
TEV: No one necessarily in particular, really. Rather, I was thinking back to your comments about American writers under 65 and coupling that with things that you talked about in your interview about the lyrical moment. It seems to me like there is a nexus of those of those concerns.
Joseph O’Neill: Yes.
TEV: Because I agree with you. It’s interesting that you have brought up Zadie Smith because I was going to ask about her next. I think that a lot of people draw the wrong kind of conclusions with a piece like the one that she wrote. I think that it sets up some false oppositions. I feel like this form of the novel is capacious enough to accommodate all different styles
Joseph O’Neill: Yes.
TEV: And the notion that one has to chose between Netherland or Remainder just seems silly. I liked Remainder a great deal, as well. I don’t feel that they’re mutually exclusive, that one must declare an allegiance.
Joseph O’Neill: I’d actually read and liked Remainder before that piece. And I thought it was a perfectly good piece of writing. I’m not sure I would describe it as unconventional, not least because that description, as I’ve said, would not mean very much.
TEV: Yes. But I think that some of the sentiments that she expresses hold sway among this younger generation of writers, whether it’s people coming out of the McSweeney’s School or the purveyors of the uber-ironic, the tendency toward a hip nihilism or something like that that. That they mistrust, in essence, the idea of a beautiful sentence. Some people find that corny, the notion of a beautiful sentence.
Joseph O’Neill: Well, it depends on how you define them as beautiful. I mean, you know, Foster Wallace wrote many beautiful sentences. I mean, there’s nothing but beautiful sentences in his work. Even though he had a particular way of doing it. What makes a sentence beautiful, for me, is its conscientiousness. A hip, ironic sensibility is not necessarily conscientious. Neither is a sensibility that latches on to dusks and dawns and roses.
TEV: You spoke in the The Guardian of “going for it” in Netherland. I’d like you talk a little bit more about what that really means.
Joseph O’Neill: Well, it means that I just wanted to write something that I felt I wasn’t controlling. I wanted to write something that I couldn’t write. And so, simply on a level of language, and a level of attentiveness, I tried to concentrate a lot more. I mean, my default mode is comedy and I can write a comic novel very quickly, and I decided not to do that. I was going to try something harder, less natural to me. And also, not shrinking from politics and New York. If you think about it, writing about New York is a crazy idea.
TEV: Such a rich tradition exists before you …
Joseph O’Neill: Exactly. Why not reinvent the wheel while you’re at it?
TEV: What do you make of labels like post-colonial, post-9/11 and other things thrown around the book?
Joseph O’Neill: I think they’re fine. I think they reflect the fact that people are engaged by the book. People are entitled to attach whatever label they want. Of course, they may not always conform to my labels.
TEV: And what would your labels be?
Joseph O’Neill: Well, I’m not labeling. I’m not going there.
TEV: Do you know anything about your next book yet?
Joseph O’Neill: I know something important about my next book, yes. I know two very important things about my next book.
TEV: I can’t imagine the things you’d care to share.
Joseph O’Neill: Once your tape is off, I’ll tell you about it.
TEV: All right, I’ll get to tease my readers. How do you find literary celebrity? I mean, I know it’s a loaded and diminished term in its way.
Joseph O’Neill: If literary celebrity means sitting at the Getty Center, having a nice lunch and staring out at whatever it is I’m staring at over here, the green hills of L.A., I’d have to say, it’s extremely agreeable. What was it that Updike said about celebrity being a mask that eats at the face of its wearer? I would say that obscurity—I’m talking about long-term, grown-up obscurity—has the same effect, only far worse. Obscurity really is a killer.
TEV: I was thinking more in terms of the company you keep. You’ve mentioned you hang out mostly with cricket players. Has your literary circle expanded as a result of this? Do you make more time with writers?
Joseph O’Neill: I hang out with cricket players on summer weekends; that’s pretty much it. I don’t want to overstate that side of things. I’ve met some writers at readings. I don’t come from that world of creative writing schools and the communities springing out of that. And I don’t come from that background of having readers from an early age, which so many well-known writers do. I marveled at that piece in the New Yorker about Ian McEwan’s 60th birthday. What basically transpires is that his lifelong friends have been Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Salman Rushdie. And there they are like the Three Musketeers, plus D’Artagnan, in this famous photograph of the four of them together. And at the same wedding, Christopher Hitchens rolls in and Zadie Smith, too, and tying it all together is this amazing web of literary fame, that ... well ... I doubt very much that my 60th birthday will be celebrated in the same way. If I’m lucky enough to reach that age.
TEV: Is there any possibility that the success of Netherland will bring your early books back into print?
Joseph O’Neill: They’ve gone back into print in the UK, this summer.
TEV: Nothing in the U.S. yet?
Joseph O’Neill: I think Blood-Dark Track is supposed to come back. I believe that the idea is to wait until this book has had its day and then bring the others back. I think that they fear that I’m going to spend many years between now and my next book.
TEV: So, they want to space them out?
Joseph O’Neill: Yes, they want to space them out -- the rather dubious pleasures of my early novels. Which of course I can’t bring myself to read a word of. Who wrote them?
TEV: James Wood, whom we were discussing earlier, has written about reliably unreliably narrators versus unreliably reliable narrators, placing more of a premium on the second one. This unreliable narrator who we sense is discovering as we are when -- I think that James Jones (from the first novel, This Is the Life) feels very much the first kind of quintessentially reliably unreliable narrator, whereas Hans seems this idealized second type. How do you approach this question of narrator reliability?
Joseph O’Neill: Well, the moment you have the first person narrator, it’s almost inevitable that the narrator is going to be unreliable. Unless you think you have created a superhuman type who is capable only of correctly analyzing the world. There’s an inherent ambiguity in the first person; you always have to ask yourself, “Who’s telling me the story?” And the more apparently reliable the narrator, the better in a way. Because the unreliability, as I think Wood suggests, becomes much more interesting, and certainly truer to the philosophical murk which lies beneath the white page.
TEV: If you accept, and you may not accept this as a premise, that writers have one or two great themes that obsess them. What would you say yours are? And feel free to reject the premise, entirely.
Joseph O’Neill: I don’t actually have the answer to this. I’m not sure that I entirely accept the premise. I mean there are certain things that obviously have to be reckoned with. Death, or essentially, how to attribute meaning to it. Ditto love. And I suppose the form itself—the novel. So, these are concerns that are unavoidable. Apart from that, I don’t know.
TEV: Have you been following the Robert Allen Stanford scandal?
Joseph O’Neill: Yeah.
TEV: Do you have any cricket-related thoughts on that controversy unfolding?
Joseph O’Neill: It was pretty obvious to me, early on, that this man was a walking bubble. And now it turns out it seems that he is a deceitful walking bubble, as well. So, I’m not surprised. But it is weird how this book, Netherland, has this absurd relationship with current events. I mean, who could have foreseen that a dodgy American cricket entrepreneur would be in the news? The fates are conspiring in favor of this novel.
TEV: And it keeps renewing itself. Giving you another go.
Joseph O’Neill: I know! It’s great fun.
TEV: How involved will you be, if at all, in the proposed film adaptation? Do you have any interest in that?
Joseph O’Neill: I’m going to be starring in it. I’ll be in the cricket parts.
TEV: Cricket consultant?
Joseph O’Neill: I mean, we’ll see. They’re still looking for a screenwriter.
TEV: So you have no interest in taking that on?
Joseph O’Neill: Absolutely not.
TEV: My last question is do you really think American’s can’t understand cricket? And, do you watch baseball at all?
Joseph O’Neill: I do watch baseball. I do understand it.
TEV: How do you find baseball?
Joseph O’Neill: I love baseball.
TEV: You do?
Joseph O’Neill: I love baseball, even though it’s the DOS-mode of cricket: “Are you having trouble downloading? Do you want the slower version?”
TEV: Does it seem unendurably slow to you?
Joseph O’Neill: No, baseball is not slower in terms of its activity. But it’s definitely a simpler bat and ball game.
TEV: Have you been to the cricket fields here in Van Nuys?
Joseph O’Neill: No, I haven’t.
TEV: It’s funny, after I read your book, I was talking to an Australian writer friend of mine. And I found that there is a cricket patch here in Van Nuys and I said, “Ok, you’ve got to take me out there one afternoon and explain it to me so that I can watch this game and see how it works.” And he promised he would but he said he’s been out there once or twice and it’s rather depressing. It’s a very shabby little patch of earth.
Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. You just don’t have real cricket fields in the United States. Except in Philadelphia, where the old cricket clubs these days have a cricket festival for a week or so in the springtime. Then the tennis nets come back up again.
TEV: Let me rephrase the question, do you think Americans can understand cricket?
Joseph O’Neill: Yes.
TEV: It’s not beyond us?
Joseph O’Neill: Well, I’m American now.
TEV: You’re a legacy case, you bring the knowledge with you.
Joseph O’Neill: I think they could understand. I think that Barack Obama certainly could.
TEV: Well, if Barack Obama picks up cricket, then you your book will really have its future sealed.
(Note: This interview was conducted well before President Obama added Netherland to his reading list. This concludes our talk with Joseph O'Neill but please do come back tomorrow when we'll be giving away a copy of the new paperback edition of Netherland.)
Great stuff - certainly worth the wait!
Posted by: Tom | July 16, 2009 at 03:52 AM
Mark, I'm not sure how I feel about your comment about young writers not being inclined towards the beautiful sentence. Simply because the uber-ironic you speak of is selling well does not mean there aren't young writers slaving over scraps of notebook paper trying to write and then rewrite the most lyrical and brilliant sentences ever written.
Posted by: Marlon | July 16, 2009 at 05:08 AM
Thanks again -- great interview!
If you write an interesting sentence people will want to read it if not then not, that is the truth.
Posted by: Damion | July 16, 2009 at 10:39 AM
A man whose socks match and loves cricket. It's moments like this that make me realise that there is hope in the world.
A beautiful interview.
Posted by: Grayson Ellis | July 16, 2009 at 11:04 AM
I'm puzzled by the belief that our younger writers are ironic. I see very little irony in their work. It's more like "irony" than true irony. Saturday Night Live style irony, as opposed to the real thing. I don't thing younger writers have had the experience of life necessary to trade in real irony. For them, it's more of a pose, an attitude than something substantive.
So I'm not sure the dichotomy between the "ueber-ironic" and the "lyrical" makes much sense in the American context, since we produce so little of either.
Posted by: Niall | July 17, 2009 at 09:05 AM
A really nice interview, Mark. It comes across like a genuine exchange of ideas, and not as a question and answer session.
But I do think you're getting hung up on Zadie Smith and her essay comparing Remainder and Netherland. First of all, I don't see, as you seem to, that she's demanding that we (as readers) should make a choice between the two: the tone of the piece is much more questioning than that.
Second of all, James Wood is prone to making the specious argument you would have Smith make: "Imagine a world in which the only possible novel available was, say, Pynchon's Vineland and books like it. It would be a hysterical and falsifying monotony. By contrast, a world in which the only available novel was, say, A House for Mr. Biswas would be a fearfully honest, comic, tragic, compassionate, and above all deeply human place."
Whatever about Smith, Wood would definitely have us choose.
Posted by: Niall Anderson | July 21, 2009 at 04:44 AM
Niall -
First let me get over the surprise at responding to someone with my name. I hope this won't cause confusion, or lead people to believe I am arguing with myself...
In re Zadie Smith's essay: She's not "demanding" anything. She's making a series of observations, using two novels as touchstones and examples of opposite tendencies. We have to separate out her opinion of the worthiness of both novels, and her opinion of the relative worthiness of the literary philosophies each represents.
Smith sees Netherland as an example of lyrical realism trying to overcome its fundamental inauthenticity by making that inauthenticity one of the subtexts of the novel. She accuses O'Neill of doing this only in order to reaffirm the authenticity of lyrical realism, but on an equally meaningless basis.
She uses Remainder as an example of how to confront the inauthenticity of realism in a more honest and aesthetically satisfying manner.
So she's not demanding we like one book over another. She's just saying that Netherland represents the end game of lyrical realism, it's descent into wink-wink, nudge-nudge self doubt, without fundamentally addressing any of the problems it is so "anxious" (Smith's term) about. She definitely sees the literary strategy of Remainder as superior and more integrated.
I don't think her essay is really targeted at readers at all. She probably couldn't care less which books get read or not. Her essay is, I think, really targeted at writers, and is attempting to convince them of how to write. I don't think she's offering Netherland as the preferred exemplar.
This is just my take on her essay. I'm not necessarily taking her side in any of this.
-Niall
Posted by: Niall | July 22, 2009 at 05:49 PM
Nialls,
Although close, I'm kind of wishing my name was Niall right about now...
What I find odd is that Smith says Netherland is about anxiety, and crisis in the modern middle class, while at the same time saying it provides a perfect image of what realism is supposed to look like… if it raises anxieties about form, isn’t it doing what many po-mo novels do? How can it be both at the same time?
If Smith condemns O’Neill’s ‘realism’ as the bedside story that comforts us the most, and if she eschews the importance of form, the truth of language and the continuity of self, what on earth is she suggesting gets us closer to our condition? That everyone write like Beckett? And how, if she has an idea, does she plan to hold reader interest without use of plot, metaphor and style?
- Nigel
Posted by: Nigel Beale | July 23, 2009 at 07:22 PM
Well, Nigel, I'm not Zadie Smith, so I can't answer any of those questions. But it does seem to me that condemning lyrical realism for being a comforting bedtime story designed to make us feel good is something quite different, and logically unconnected from denying "the truth of language and the continuity of self".
I think, rather Smith could easily say that the problem with lyrical realism is that it abuses those qualities in the service of propaganda, whereas the aesthetic of Remainder deploys those same resources to achieve a more honest image of how we think and live.
It's also important to remind ourselves that Smith in her essay doesn't see lyrical realism as a genre that is dead. Only that it is so out of synch with the world we live in that even lyrical realists like O'Neill feel the need to try to evolve it. This means, in turn, that Smith would probably be quite happy with a more fully evolved form of lyrical realism.
But that's just me.
Posted by: Niall | July 24, 2009 at 07:35 AM
Two Nialls and a Nigel responding to an O'Neill interview! It's the kind of unlikely sleight of hand that Wood would call hysterically realist.
Niall (not Anderson), I agree with you that irony is rare in new fiction. It's a subtle state of mind, and something about this culture doesn't permit it to flourish. Much, much easier to find it in 18th c. French literature, for instance, though much of the humor in Amis and Barnes is also ironic.
Posted by: Neil Appleton | July 27, 2009 at 01:36 PM