Racial Preoccupations, Realism, and Elite Perspective in Joseph O'Neill's Netherland.

I argue that Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is a novel offering fascinating criticisms of white, Eurocentric perspectives when understood within the context of research about conservative Caucasian responses to racial, ethnic, and national diversity. Narrator Hans situates readers in post-9/11 New York and tells the story of leaving his predominantly white Manhattan milieu to join a cricket league. Originally from The Netherlands, Hans comes to the US from London, and the vast majority of the characters he interacts with are first-generation Americans; he is also the only Caucasian in his cricketing circle. Within his immersion into New York's diversity, we see Hans's racial conservativism, which emerges from his elite Western European experience and education. By taking a narratological approach to the novel, I go against the grain of recent criticism about the novel (including articles published in this journal) and assert that Netherland is critical of its central character. O'Neill draws on formal strategies of juxtaposition and implication to reveal the shortcomings in Hans's thinking, even while showing Hans making efforts to deepen his relation to history's Others. Thus we see O'Neill make whiteness meet itself by meeting otherness, simultaneously exposing the ways facile celebrations of diversity can mask the deeper problem of global inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]