A string of superficial facts.  Paul Auster confesses here to the greatest weakness of his work of the past decade: his stories are summarized rather than detailed.  Readers want to immerse themselves in the details of a story.  The mechanism for that immersion may be the plot, the characters, the setting, the psychology, the ideas, the language, any of the elements of the form.  But merely outlining the contours of a story will never be enough to satisfy the readerly itch.

There is a story told in Man in the Dark, the recent Auster novel in which this scene occurs, about an alternative Earth, one that diverged with our own after Bush v. Gore in 2000, with New York leading a secession from the Union and America going to war to return the wayward states to the fold.  The story, whose main power comes from this scenario, comprises most of the story and, according to reviewers, is the story at the heart of this novel.  But that isn’t true.  The story of the war between the American states is ended abruptly and abandoned in the second half of this book to be replaced by the reminiscences about the dead wife of August Brill, who had been telling himself the story of that civil war to avoid thinking about the past.

The story at the heart of Man in the Dark is Brill’s story, and to a lesser extent, that of his granddaughter, who blames herself for the death of her ex-boyfriend, who was decapitated in Iraq while serving as a contractor driving supplies.  Brill and his granddaughter, Katya, are not simply in mourning for those they have lost but are seriously traumatized by the boyfriend’s vicious and gruesome death, which they witnessed in an online video.  They have spent months trying to drown the image of that death with other beautiful images by watching the finest movies ever made.  One of the best sections of the book are discussions of some of their recent viewings—Tokyo Story, The World of Apu, Grand Illusion, and The Bicycle Thief—and what makes them so beautiful and meaningful.  But this story of trauma and recovery and the meaning of story in our lives isn’t given the same texture, isn’t revealed through detail as the alternative America was, and it suffers from that lack.  That is why so many reviewers claimed the novel was about that other America rather than about the people suffering so much they would tell themselves such a story.

Auster, clearly, recognizes this, knows that contrasting a detailed peripheral story with a sketched central story will put the central story in a bad light.  So why would he purposely undermine his story?  Auster gives us a two-part answer.  The first comes near the end, when Brill considers another memory, “an image from the distant past, perhaps real, perhaps imagined, I can hardly tell the difference anymore.  The real and the imagined are one.  Thoughts are real, even thoughts of unreal things.”  Stories, then, are important, just as important as real life.  But this doesn’t say anything about stories well-told rather than briefly discussed.  This part of the answer comes from that earlier discussion of the great films, when Katya offers this theory of greatness: “Inanimate objects as a means of expressing human emotions.  That’s the language of film.”  Again, Auster points us not toward abstraction but toward specificity as the necessary ingredients of greatness, and greatness in terms of emotional truth, of meaning in art.

A few days later when I tried the same thing with the much-heralded Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, the words clotted together in my mouth as if I were speaking through salt-water taffy.  The baby quickly lost interest and crawled away to play among the bric-a-brac sloughed from the shelf in the bedroom’s brooding corner.

If you find the above comparison unfair and overwrought, you’re right.  I shouldn’t expect journeyman novelist Joseph O’Neill to measure up to a Nobel laureate like Naipaul.  And my overheated parody poorly approximates O’Neill’s own portentous style.  The significance of the experiment is simply this: while so many others have praised the language of this book, I found it infelicitous and clumsy because it tries too hard.  And it must try so hard because the story itself is so slight.

The manner in which the story unfolds also annoyed me.  O’Neill dives into the consciousness of his principle character, the Dutch financial analyst Hans van den Broek, following his thoughts from one association to another even when those associations have only marginal relevance to the present time of the narrative.  Perhaps another kind of reader would find these diversions entrancing, but I too frequently asked myself where this story was going and too seldom did a satisfactory answer appear.

Zadie Smith, in her incisive review for the NYRB, compared Netherland unfavorably with Remainder by Tom McCarthy, a decidedly more experimental novel.  She argues that these two novels present quite contrasting views of what the novel is about and what is possible in the form.  Surprisingly, despite its negative tone, her evaluation is what finally spurred me to begin reading Netherland.  I can’t say exactly why, but her description made me think that his novel, while more conventional, was also more richly-written and (possibly) as vaster in scope.

Turns out I misunderstood her (or she lied to me).  Very early on, I noted that none of the critics bothered to mention how boring the book was, with its languid descriptions of insignificant things and meandering reminiscences that lead nowhere.  I almost gave up.  Eventually I returned to finish the book, wondering if it would perhaps end in such a way that the whole enterprise would be redeemed (as some have suggested), but no.  The final scene is as conventional and forced as every other one.  The ending left me not only unmoved but slightly miffed that all this symbolic hullabaloo could culminate in so little, as if the minor, entirely-obvious epiphany so characteristic of a certain species of sterile ”New Yorker“ short story might be enough to sustain and justify an entire novel.

I have no doubt that a certain kind of reader might very well enjoy this book.  But I am not of that sort.