Joseph O’Neill: The River Styx Interview
Photo credit: Michael Lionstar
Joseph O’Neill has written several books, including Netherland, Godwin, and a deeply absorbing memoir, Blood-Dark Track, and several short stories, most recently “Keuka Lake” in the New Yorker. Each of his works showcases not only distinctive storytelling but also an intellectual rigor that places him (in this writer’s opinion) in the ranks of Gass and Gaddis, and although he paints on a smaller canvas (his books are far shorter than The Tunnel or The Recognitions), his ideas are no less thoughtfully constructed and profound. The first book of O’Neill’s I ever read was Netherland, a book as strange and eerily timely in relation to 9/11 as Radiohead’s weird and brilliant album, Kid A. Whereas the latter somehow prophesied a dark, abrupt turn in America’s near future, Netherland witnessed to the turn in hindsight. A car crash in a rearview mirror. I think anyone who reads the book, even now, some 17 years later, will come away feeling that catastrophes—and their lingering shadows—are if not endurable then at least survivable. In that sense, Netherland is both a product of its epoch and a timeless case study on the “temporal undercurrents” that help shape our identities in times of strife.
CASTILLE: Let’s start by going back to the publication of Netherland. Critics at the time framed the novel as quintessentially post-9/11. The Whitman epigraph certainly sets that frame. But that was another place and time, another New York. How challenging is it to write about matters that loom large in the public consciousness?
O’NEILL: The original idea for Netherland concerned a man who dreams of starting a cricket enterprise in New York—I’d actually met someone, a Pakistani named Max Shaukat, who had attempted something similar. I was trying to write that story when the events of 9/11 happened. That put a stop to a lot of things, including novel-writing, for a while. The reality of 9/11 was not exhausted, to my mind, by the attacks of al-Qaida. Far from it—it quickly became apparent that the U.S. response to the attacks—the invention of the Department of Homeland Security, the war of aggression against Iraq—was a big part of the story. In the end I set the novel in the post 9/11 period—not because I was newly anxious to deliver myself of 9/11 thoughts and themes, but because I had to obey the logic of a book concerned with contemporary New York and its relations with the world. These relations had changed a lot. It was challenging to write, of course; but it would have been challenging in any case. Writing of any kind is very difficult.
CASTILLE: Your characters live all over the map, literally. In your memoir, Blood-Dark Track, you mention having lived in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Where is “home” for you right now? Are you where you want to be, geographically speaking?
O’NEILL: That’s right. I was born in Ireland but immediately removed by my parents—Irish father, French-speaking Turkish mother of Christian Arab ethnicity—on years of globetrotting that ended only when they settled the family in The Hague. My siblings and I were early specimens of what are now called Third Culture kids. I went to French and English international schools, followed by university in England and a decade-long legal career in London, followed by a semi-accidental move to New York. Right now, home remains New York City, where I’ve lived longer than any other place. But I’ve never really had, or yearned for, a “home” in the sense of a permanent place of belonging.
CASTILLE: In a Paris Review interview from 2014 you said, “I’ve moved around so much and lived in so many different places that I don’t really belong to a particular place.” This reminds me of something Flannery O’Connor wrote in Mystery and Manners: “When we talk about the writer’s country, we are liable to forget that no matter what particular country it is, it is inside as well as outside him.” What is your true country?
O’NEILL: My true country, in the O’Connor sense, is a childlike place of language and dreaming—a kind of Eden of games and good friends and family relations from which I am incessantly expelled, into the political and social world. The tree of knowledge, here, would be the news of the world and the sense of responsibility that the news engenders in me—politically as well as artistically.
CASTILLE: History and experience can, for better or worse, anchor us in a particular place. We feel drawn to the comforts of familiarity, especially as we age. And yet after reading your books it seems that maybe that’s not true for you at all.
O’NEILL: I do find comfort in places of recurrence—in the small seaside town in Turkey to which my family resorts every summer, in visiting Ireland and London and The Hague—but I think I would feel coffined if I did not have a new place to savor. Currently that place is Montreal, where we go as often and as for as long as possible.
CASTILLE: You and I are old enough to remember the world before the internet. Now that social media has brought other places and peoples into focus in a way humans have never experienced before, is it possible—permissible—to write a novel that isn’t situated in a global context?
O’NEILL: Everything is possible, everything is permissible. People can read and write what they want. My own imagination is fairly borderless, especially in my longer fiction. I don’t feel a personal need to explicate or investigate a particular culture, which is what so much fiction has been and remains. There’s a reason we categorize literature in national terms.
CASTILLE: What makes a person worldly today as opposed to, say, when you wrote Netherland?
O’NEILL: That’s a very interesting question. I’m not sure that I can answer it.
CASTILLE: Your recent story in the New Yorker, “Keuka Lake,” is about a middle-aged woman named Nadia who is coping with the sudden loss of her husband, Drew, who died in a car accident. When Drew disappears from Nadia’s life (when someone disappears from anyone’s life, I suppose) it creates a vacuum. Is that where the “internal interlocutor” came from? A coping mechanism to fill the void?
O’NEILL: I think that we all and always have internal interlocutors—that inner audience to which we address our thoughts. Nadia, no doubt because she has been recently widowed, becomes conscious of this entity.
CASTILLE: There’s a brief scene where Nadia gets a speeding ticket. A less gifted writer might have drawn out this scene, scripting out the back-and-forth between Nadia and the officer, but you offer only flashes, the most important beats of the scene. The result is somewhat dreamlike. Then, as suddenly as the scene begins, you shift forward in time: “Two weeks later, Nadia is in the Yonkers office ….” No section break, just a new paragraph. Third person, of course, allows for abrupt temporal shifts, but I’m curious—does this happen while writing the initial draft or during revision?
O’NEILL: Big “temporal shifts,” as you put it, happen during the initial draft, intuitively. When I’m revising, now that I think of it, I cut as many connector-words as I can—words like but, however, and, therefore, and so on—precisely to introduce a kind of abruptness and speed. Connector-words are very useful in the first draft, when you’re dreaming your way forward and those conjunctions help you to develop the logical progression of what’s coming out.
CASTILLE: What are you writing next?
O’NEILL: I’m working on a story. I think that will be my form for the foreseeable future. I can’t currently imagine writing another novel, for a variety of reasons that I don’t understand.
CASTILLE: What books do you return to?
O’NEILL: So many. Off the top of my head: Dubliners, Wallace Stevens, Frank Kermode, Nicholson Baker, Muriel Spark, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, the late novels of Philip Roth, Emmanuel Levinas, Shakespeare’s late stuff.
Joseph O’Neill is the author of the novels The Breezes, The Dog, Godwin, Good Trouble, Netherland (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), and This is the Life. He has also written a family history, Blood-Dark Track. He lives in New York City and teaches at Bard College.
Bryan Castille is Managing Editor of River Styx.