An interview with Joseph O'Neill

An interview with Joseph O'Neill Charlie Reilly (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution © Lisa Ackerman Examine the criticism of Joseph O'Neill's work or speak to anyone who has read Netherland or Blood-Dark Track, and sooner or later you will find yourself contemplating O'Neill's remarkable style. It's not so much the superbly realized characters and unexpected plot shifts as it is those extraordinary passages where narration all but supersedes narrative. You find yourself rereading phrases, lingering over lyrical passages, wishing the literary "trip" would never end. So much of O'Neill's prose recalls the lyricism and imagery that admirers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, and William Faulkner have searched for in contemporary fiction. Time and again critics discussing O'Neill are driven to literary analogies. Tymon Smith argues that O'Neill's use of language places him "firmly in a line running from Balzac and Flaubert through to modern realists like Bellow, Naipaul and Roth." Nicholas Lezard observes: "It's like Saul Bellow without the sometimes unnerving feeling of de haut en bas. Bellow? Sometimes it's like Proust." James Wood also compares O'Neill to Naipaul, and Dwight Garner sees a "glowing" echo of Alfred Kazin. Mark Thomas calls O'Neill "a prose stylist of the first order," and John Freeman says that O'Neill writes "sentences so beautiful they lodge in the reader's mind and remind us of the inimitable pleasure of encountering the world through its shapely reflection." Perhaps William Kowalski best summed up matters: "He does not seem to be trying, thank God, to be literary. He merely is." [End Page 1] Although O'Neill writes occasionally for The Atlantic and The New York Times, his books to date consist of only three novels—Netherland (Pantheon, 2008), The Breezes (Faber, 1995), and This Is the Life (Faber 1991)—and a family history, Blood-Dark Track (Granta, 2001). Those works have earned him Ireland's Kerry Group Fiction Award and America's PEN/Faulkner award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Cullman Center Fellowship. Netherland enjoyed national and international acclaim, and Blood-Dark Track made The Economist's and The Irish Times's best books of the year lists. Joseph O'Neill's life to date has been unusual, to put it mildly. O'Neill was born in Ireland in 1964 to an Irish father and a Turkish mother, both of whom soon moved the family to Africa and then to Asia. He was raised in the Netherlands, read law at Girton College, Cambridge, and graduated from the Inns of Court School of Law. For over a decade in London, he was a full-time barrister and part-time novelist. In his spare time, O'Neill is an accomplished cricketer, having made Holland's Under-19 National Team and continuing to play in amateur leagues in New York City, where he lives. He is currently working on a novel set mainly in Dubai. Netherland is a long flashback in which the narrator, a Dutch-born Manhattan equities analyst, is stunned to learn of the murder of a fellow cricket enthusiast and quasi business partner who has been found handcuffed and drowned in Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal. News of the murder causes Hans to reflect upon his experiences during and after the 9/11 attacks, when he and his wife and son lived in the Chelsea section of the city. At least they lived there until his wife, a successful corporate attorney, left him and took their son back to London. That's the surface of the novel. Beneath that surface is a spell-binding narrative in which Hans recalls his struggles in the psychological netherworld that New York became during the years after the attacks. The novel is distinguished by a determined "voice" and an intricate use of point of view, both of which O'Neill discusses in the interview. In addition, he speaks about the illegitimacy of the Iraq war, the special "space" created by Fitzgerald in his seminal The Great Gatsby, and the book's [End Page 2] remarkable ending, which seems to fluctuate between a view from the London Eye Ferris wheel and a...