Looking Away from 9/11: The Optics of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland

Risky business in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland

“…Given the domesticated limitations of the post-9/11 novel, it is worth noting that Hans’s engagement with racial difference via his participation in games of cricket conducted by New York’s marginal, immigrant communities has been read as a salutary response to the 9/11 preoccupation with traumatic domesticity (see Rothberg, 2009; Hartnell, 2011; Golimowska, 2013; and Wasserman, 2014). For Elizabeth Anker, by contrast, cricket, like Hans’s promiscuous sexual escapades, merely represents another form of “narcotic diversion” (Anker, 2011: 473) providing a backdrop for his rehabilitation.…”

“…By foregrounding risk as the conceptual hinge linking speculative forms of financial acquisition to apocalyptic forms of terror, I posit a developmental shift away from critical perspectives attempting either to frame The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland as salutary de- or extraterritorial correctives (see Rothberg, 2009; Golimowska, 2013; Wasserman, 2014) to the post-9/11 novel’s presiding preoccupation with traumatic domesticity (Gray, 2008), or those intent on foregrounding their gendered and racial limitations (Anker, 2011). By contrast, my approach develops existing arguments attentive to Hamid and O’Neill’s interest in illuminating otherwise surreptitious linkages between finance capital and 9/11 (see Morey, 2011; Medevoi, 2011; Darda, 2014).…”

New York City as Dwelling Place: Reinventing the American Dream in Steven Millhauser'sMartin Dressler, Joseph O'Neill'sNetherland, and Atticus Lish'sPreparation for the Next Life

“…Joseph O'Neill's Netherland revisits New York City as a seemingly boundless opportunity to pursue the American dream but rewrites that dream as a more modest pursuit of a stable home and family life, more nearly akin to the originary dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than the later dream of building a personal empire in the pursuit of wealth, social status, or merely, like Martin Dressler, in pursuit of the dream itself. Set in the New York City at the turn of the next century, in the wake of 9/11, Netherland is both post‐9/11 and postcolonial (Golimowska; Snyder; Wasserman). But it does not dwell on either the post‐9/11 “historical and experiential abyss” or the “emotional entanglements” of its characters’ domestic lives (Gray 130, 134).…”