After many months of not reading any novels for fun, a couple weeks ago, I finally decided I would make time to read something. I had heard rave reviews about "Netherland," Joseph O'Neill's latest offering. And I also heard President Obama say he was reading it, so I decided I should "be like Barack" and get the book.

Here's some of the back-cover praise:

"With echoes of 'The Great Gatsby,' Fitzgerald's masterpiece, Joseph O'Neill's stunning new novel, 'Netherland' provides a resonant meditation on the American Dream."

--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Exquisitely written...a large fictional achievement, and one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read...Netherland has a deep human wisdom."

--James Wood, The New Yorker

"Remarkable...note perfect."
--Vogue

If I have to concede that the above folks read the same book as me, then I have to humbly concede that I "don't get it." I feel like I am on the outside of an in-joke. Despite the reviews, I thought the book was fair-to-middlin'. And a number of times, I had the distinct feeling that I was missing something.

Happily, it was not a long book, so I could get through it in fairly short order by reading 10 minutes or so in the morning and 10 minutes or so at night.

I especially take issue with the "echoes of the Great Gatsby" comment. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen speaking to Dan Quayle about Jack Kennedy: "I knew Jay Gatsby and let me tell you, you're no Gatsby."

Well...of course I didn't *know* Jay Gatsby, but I have read the book at least five times...it's one of my favorites...and Netherland doesn't even echo the real deal.

I found Netherland to be overwrought, and full of prolix writing (e.g., why use a word like "prolix" when "wordy" would be fine?) Netherland is full of examples like that, using a 50-cent word or a string of 50-cent words when a 10-center will do fine. It's okay sometimes, and I of course resemble that remark on occasion...but basically the whole book is like that.

I felt little positive or negative about the main character, and there were several significant digressions that to me, added nothing...although perhaps if I were more intelligent, I would be able to connect the dots and understand why the digressions were important. Mind you, on the scale of literary digressions, they were plenty big enough to notice, but not deal-killers.

On the scale of literary digressions, with 1 being a random little paragraph on jellyfish, and a 10 being several pages on ocean currents (with Melville's chapter-long mediations on "white" and "whale blubber" in Moby Dick being 23's) then the digressions in Netherland were generally in the 4-5 range.

My time is up for this entry, but I will end by saying that the soaring expectations engendered by the mellifluous and ebulliently rhapsodic reviews have been inexorably brought earthward, Icarus-like, after I read the exposition in question.

**In case I failed miserably in parody, the above paragraph is meant to be a friendly mocking of O'Neill's style...and if you couldn't tell that...i.e., if you thought that sounded normal for me, then I may have to cut off my blogging fingers!