Good morning, Saloners! I hope this day finds you with something interesting to read!

Me, I’m halfway through a book that I’m finding a lot more interesting than I expected. Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. Although the subject matter sounded pretty dreary, I could not resist when I heard that President Obama was reading it.

Dreary, indeed. The first-person protagonist is a lonely, clinically-depressed financial analyst living in post-9/11 NYC. His marriage is falling apart, he lives in a seedy hotel, his work is meaningless, and he is adrift in the world. The one thing that seems to keep Hans anchored is cricket, which takes him back to his childhood in Holland. He has made friends with a strange guy named Chuck Ramkissoon — a businessman who’s full of get-rich-quick schemes like turning cricket into a mainstream American sport.

Dreary stuff, but strangely compelling. I am loving this book, and I’m not even sure why. I think because the writing is superb, first of all. And second, we get so much inside the narrator’s head, he is so human and real, that despite the fact that he’s a depressed cricket-playing financial analyst I can completely identify with him. Here’s a passage that I particularly loved:

Although I glanced at them, I didn’t respond to Chuck’s communications. My instinct was to keep him at a distance, at that distance, certainly, that we introduce between ourselves and those we suspect of neediness. I was wondering, for example, when he was going to ask me for money for his cricket scheme. But I was also drawn to Chuck. I had him down as a lover of contingencies and hypotheses, a man cheerfully operating in the subjunctive mood. The business world is densely margined by dreamers, men, almost invariably, whose longing selves willingly submit to the enchantment of projections and pie charts and crisply totted numbers, who toy and toy for years, like novelists, with the same sheaf of documents, who slip out of bed in the middle of the night to pitch to a pajama’d reflection in a windowpane.

Hans goes on to reflect that although he himself lacks “entrepreneurial wistfulness” he is no stranger to daydreams and fantasies, such as being a world-famous cricket player.

How many of us are completely free of such scenarios? Who hasn’t known, a little shamefully, the joys they bring? I suspect that what keeps us harmless from them is not, as many seem to believe, the maintenance of a strict frontier between the kingdoms of the fanciful and the actual, but the contrary: the permitting of a benign annexation of the latter by the former, so that our daily motions always cast a secondary otherworldly shadow and, at those moments when we feel inclined to turn from the more plausible and hurtful meanings of things, we soothingly find ourselves attached to a companion far-fetched sense of the world and our place in it. It’s the incompleteness of reverie that brings trouble — that, one might argue, brought Chuck Ramkissoon the worst trouble of all. His head wasn’t sufficiently in the clouds. He had a clear enough view of the gap between where he stood and where he wished to be, and he was determined to find a way across.

Isn’t that great? I mean, doesn’t “cheerfully operating in the subjunctive mood” just say it all? And isn’t the businessman-novelist comparison just too poignant? And finally, if you (like me) are someone whose head is quite sufficiently in the clouds, isn’t it comforting to think that it’s “the incompleteness of reverie” that causes trouble?

The descriptions of his failing marriage and the mood in NYC during the first few years after 9/11 are equally nuanced and fresh. This novel is almost entirely character-driven — not much plot in the first half, anyway — but it is absolutely riveting and I would just love to know what Obama thinks of it. Or you, if you’ve read it.