The World

I was fascinated to read in Lucy Kellaway’s column today that Barack Obama is reading “Netherland” – most of my friends and family seem to be reading it as well. I wonder what it is that makes a novel suddenly go “viral” in this way. It is not as if Joseph O’Neill’s book has recieved massive Harry Potter-like coverage. It missed out on the major book awards – it didn’t make the Booker shortlist in Britain. Nor is its subject matter obviously compelling: a Dutch man going through a marital crisis in post 9-11 New York discovers cricket.

Still – obviously sub-consciously influenced by the cultural climate – I picked up a copy of “Netherland” in Waterstones a couple of months ago. I was enjoying it and about half-way through after a flight, when my wife stole it. Since then, it has been sitting on the wrong bedside table and I have got distracted and failed to finish it. But in the intervening weeks – my oldest friend and my mother have both told me how good it is. My wife has read it; my colleagues are mentioning it in columns. And now even the American president is reading it, so perhaps I better reclaim the book and get to the end.

A couple of the women I have discussed “Netherland” with claim it is a “boy’s book” – too much about cricket and his mother apparently, as well as boring bits where O’Neill strays from the narrative to describe the scenery or a passer-by.

The fact that it should appeal to Obama does – I think – make an interesting contrast with President George W. Bush. Bush was also a great reader, believe it or not, but his tastes tended towards the lives of great men; biographies of Churchill and Lincoln, for example. For a while it looked like Obama was pursuing the same sort of “useful books for a president” strategy – hence his well-advertised interest in Doris Kearn Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals”. But “Netherland” – melancholy, descriptive and inward-looking – reveals a different side of the president. Perhaps he is still the same man who wrote the melancholy and inward-looking “Dreams From My Father”