Rick Simonson

Storytellers
May 19, 2008

So far this spring, our friends at Knopf (and Pantheon) have seem to have largely been about putting some extraordinary short-story collections out into the world. Both Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, a New York Times #1 bestseller, and Tobias Wolff's Our Story Begins have been running strong. They're about to be joined by a noteworthy debut collection, Nam Le's The Boat.

As the Sunday, May 18 New York Times Book Review attests, with glowing reviews, some extraordinary novels are also at hand.

Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is, I believe, hitting the street on Tuesday, May 20. Compared to some colleagues I got a late start (it's a top BookSense pick for June), but I'm glad to have found it early enough to help put it in people's hands. One must smile at Sonny Mehta's disingenuous comments on the back of the Pantheon advance edition. Netherland is all he says it is, a Dutch banker 'marooned' in New York after 9/11 - uncertain about his marriage, his work (a banker working in oil), about much else, and then drawn into surprising encounters and a deepened exploration of where he is. What Sonny downplays is that Netherland is, very possibly, the Great American Cricket Novel - not that there have been so many candidates. (If you want to hear Mr. Mehta wax with enthusiasm about something other than a championed book, cricket could be your subject.) 

Cricket is beautifully used as a way of looking at the present - the subcultures of immigrant men (mostly) playing wherever they can, the adaptation made to the different fields here and the kind of batting thus entailed, even for entrepeneurial aspirations; and the past, in terms of how linked it has been to baseball, and the shaping of an earlier New York City.

Netherland works on many other levels, certainly in conveying the texture of the tentative, slippery slope of a marriage and parenthood. It also features the only scenes in a book I've yet encountered where someone uses Google Earth - puts words to what one does in 'flipping' around the world - and does so here to very moving ends.

Then there is Rabih Alameddine and The Hakawati. Like Joseph O'Neill, Rabih Alameddine has other books published, and published well-enough, elsewhere. But one suspects that that the present one, the first with Knopf or Pantheon, is the one that could well bolt out.

"Hakawati" is Arabic for storyteller. In this swirling, sweeping novel, Rabih Alameddine tells many stories, working most centrally off a young man's return to Beirut from his Los Angeles home to be at his father's deathbed. Lorraine Adams' Sunday Times  review smartly sets it in terms of tradition, the many books it draws upon (Old Testament, Koran, Thousand and One Nights, Ovid, Homer), the myths and legends air it carries elegantly, lightly (enough), and yet give it a weight that both incorporates a difficult if not tragic present, but places it in some longer, larger context - one we all need to be able to see and say to truly try and comprehend the world we're in. The Hakwati in no way sets out to teach - it sings and dances, its language is loved and lovely (carries some strong longing, too), has here, there, then, when, and everywhere about it - and yet it is also deeply instructive. I can think of few novels I've lately encountered, good as many have been, that have made the (mythic, mystic) layers of life so comprehensible, so rich, as this one does.

Rabih Alameddine himself paid Elliott Bay a visit this past Friday. He was great, to be seen and heard wherever he can be - and  he is full of stories. (There is a wonderful one, not for telling here, of how this book got to Knopf editor Robin Desser ...)  

Hearing Rabih read made me want to read this brimming book all over again. I remember the first time around, it being the primary book read for all the plane changes and delays coming and going from Louisville and the Winter Institute in January. Perhaps that (this book) is why I've been carrying around, so vividly, certain moments from that seemingly long-ago (big coat weather) little patch of time. Perhaps. It's a book that helps one see the stories in one's life, how they shape, stir, shift, set, and then take on some new/old form yet again. To be read -  to be continued ...

Posted by Rick Simonson on May 19, 2008 | Comments (0)