Zadie Smith on 'Netherland'

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By Newsweek Editors

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Years ago, I saw a man tangoing with a life-size puppet in the Times Square subway station. Last spring, I came across this passage in Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland": "Gripping his inanimate partner with grotesque eagerness, the man sweated and pranced and shuffled his way through a series … of fox trots and tangos and fandangos and pasodobles ... There was something dire going on—something that went beyond the desperation, economic and artistic, discernible on the man's damp features, beyond even the sexual perverseness of his routine." I felt that shiver of recognition that a spot-on description can give you. Later I read Zadie Smith's essay "Two Paths for the Novel." While praising O'Neill's skill, she asks if he did his job too well. In its quest for the perfectly wrought image, she argues, fiction like "Netherland" is inauthentic because life consists of so much simulation and confusion: "Is this really Realism?" But rather than making me feel embarrassed for enjoying "Netherland," Smith's piece deepened my reading of it, and of all the novels I've read since.

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