At the risk of sounding deliberately obtuse (or maybe just looking stupid), let me start by saying that I've never really understood what globalization is, or why it's a bad thing. Or a good thing I suppose, if you happen to be one of those people who're fans of the phenomenon. Whatever it is. Is globalization a kind of undue, unfair influence on hundreds of national economies by a few, largely Western nations (which seems to me a colonial rather than contemporary model), or is it the interdependence of the world's economies based on financial markets, extraterritorial ownership, regional specialization, and the ever-increasing ease and speed of shipping? Is it the domination (or decimation) of the world's immense variety of cultural expression by a hegemonic American materialism, which has as much to do with Disney as it does (or did, once upon a time) with Detroit, or is it the cross-pollenization of the world's cultures, which gives rise to any number of hybrid identities and ever-fewer pure species of being? Is it, in other words, a calculated restructuring of the comforting divisions between us and them (civilized and barbaric, white and colored, Western and non-) in service to the most sanctified binary of all, rich and poor, or is it an anarchic, unstable relationality based on mutable, permeable systems rather than fixed positions? As far as I can tell, it's all of these things, which makes globalization a bit like the island in the fairy tale that turns out to be a whale--a fact you discover only when it dives beneath the ocean, leaving you stranded in the water.

Whale/islands happen to be a staple of many videogames, however, and if you've ever played them then you know that the only thing to do when you find yourself on one is to jump off before it sinks. So that's what I'm going to do. Rather than attempt to pin down the meaning of globalization, let alone judge it, I'm going to try to zero in on the most literal aspect of the term, i.e., the global one, specifically as it applies to Joe's initial question about how globalization international influences have changed the meaning of "'American fiction.'"

American writers have always always wrestled with the balance between national and global modes of expression, although "global" almost always meant "Western." Early settlers described the New World in the conventional terms of the European travelogue; early poets and novelists wrote in a genteel (and God-awful boring) bourgeois vernacular; and those few people who were interested in native stories rendered them, first of all, in prose (an instant Europeanization) but also inflected the storytelling with European modes of character and narrative. Americanness, then, was initially a question of content, and if a purely American form of storytelling ever emerged (at least after 1492) I'm not aware of it. But content can be divided into two categories: what we might call subject--slavery, let's say, or the romance, which Americans know as the love story, or the bildungsroman (by which I mean the coming-of-age story, of course)--and theme, which nowadays I suppose we'd call spin (sigh). If American novelists were for a time guilty of writing rather exclusively about America, the real crime (at least as Europeans judged it) was not so much provinciality as the wilful, almost proud ignorance with which we wrote about ourselves--a naivete perhaps, but one that gave rise to an immense optimism and freedom lacking in most European literature. In Lawrence's famous assessment:

It is the same old thing as in all Americans. They keep their old-fashioned ideal frock-coat on, and an old-fashioned silk hat, while they do the most impossible things. There you are: you see Melville hugged in bed by a huge tattooed South Sea Islander, and solemnly offering burnt offering to this savage's little idol, and his ideal frock-coat just hides his shirt-tails and prevents us from seeing his bare posterior as he salaams, while his ethical silk hat sits correctly over his brow the while. That is so typically American: doing the most impossible things without taking off their spiritual get-up. Their ideals are like armour which has rusted in, and will never more come off. And meanwhile in Melville his bodily knowledge moves naked, a living quick among the stark elements. For with sheer physical vibrational sensitiveness, like a marvellous wireless-station, he registers the effects of the outer world. And he records also, almost beyond pain or pleasure, the extreme transitions of the isolated, far-driven soul, the soul which is now alone, without any real human contact.

Melville's provicinialism butts up against Lawrence's (well-intentioned, I'm sure) cultural misappropriation: Queequeg is a prince, a cannibal, and a skilled harpooner, but he's not a Muslem, and probably never "salaam[ed]" in his life (although, to be fair, Lawrence might be taking his cue from Ishmael, who refers to Queequeg's religious fasting as his "Ramadan"). What you have left after all of this falls away is "sheer physical vibrational sensitiveness" and "the isolated, far-driven soul." With his English education, Lawrence seems to have missed the fact that on many levels Moby-Dick is simply an example of late Transcendatalism; but, for the same reason, he was able to see that Melville was a greater writer than Hawthorne or Thoreau or Emerson or even Whitman. What I like about this story (at least in this context) is how looking beyond America made Melville a better writer than his peers, but that it took a non-American to point it out. Melville was the first great American writer to look beyond the frontier for his subject, and one of the things he revealed to us is that the American point of view became more interesting when it was freed from our geographically large but intellectually constrained borders, a lesson we were slow, perhaps even unwilling, to learn, which is why Melville's reputation lingered in the doldrums until Lawrence resuscitated it.

What Melville did with the rough, as it were, Henry James soon enough did with the smooth. Melville's ports of call were decidely exotic (in the parlance of the day), whereas James' were as quotidian as they come--assuming, of course, that your idea of the quotidian involves an English country house or Italian palazzo. For the first time, European elitism was reflected back on itself, and revealed not just as snobbery, but as immoral (for James, the only questions worth considering are those with moral content) stagnation of character. It was this global perspective that made Melville a greater novelist than Mark Twain, and James better than Edith Wharton. Twain and Wharton knew Americans better than did Melvile and James; perhaps they even knew human beings better. But Melville and James knew the human condition--knew that the "far-driven soul," to use Lawrence unabashedly mystical term, though only visible through the human shell, with all its ethnic, sexual, and national qualifiers, nonetheless had an identity that transcended any such liminal contexts.

Which just about brings us up to the first World War, which for me is the watershed moment for American fiction (it was for European fiction as well, but for different and very specific reasons, which is why European fiction produced great masterpieces after the World War I, but American fiction was itself the masterwork of the twentieth century). After the war, the best (or at any rate the most interesting) American novelists looked abroad for cues how to write in a way they hadn't since the 17th and 18th centuries. Stein, Hemingway, and Faulkner saw the novel as part of a global phenomenon, one whose epicenter was probably Bloomsbury, but which spread out to include Ireland and France and Germany and Russia, which is why these writers were the progenitive figures of their generation. By contrast, writers such as Thornton Wilder or Thomas Wolfe or the beloved totem of both the Great American Novel and the American Dream, F. Scott Fitzgerald, remained figures of local, even provincial interest--writers whose success was what younger generations desired to emulate, rather than any stylistic or thematic bent. As the century progressed, the number and variety of international influences on American fiction only grew: Samuel Beckett, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Bernhard, and Haruki Murakami, and Roberto Bolaño, to name only a few, had, and continue to have, great influence on the way Americans write--not just formally, but in terms of how they see the world, an international point of view they bring to bear on any subject, whether it's Americans in America, Americans abroad, immigrants and aliens in the United States, or a purely international cast and setting.

The fact that many of these writers, especially the non-European ones, were or are working in a Westernized idiom (and, in some cases, Western languages) only highlighted the fact that fiction has on some level transcended national boundaries to become a global conversation. If the form itself is undoubtedly a Western one--though devotees of The Tale of Genji or Dream of the Red Chamber make a pretty convincing case for independent invention, with Western novels just having been in the right place at the right time to claim the title of creation--it is also livened, indeed rejuvenated, by international content. Whether this is a literary version of dressing a savage in civilized clothes in order to display him to proper society is a separate and contentious issue; the fact remains that the American novel is better for seeing itself as as part of an inextricably interconnected global phenomenon in which no party, no place, can lay claim to being here or there. There's only one earth, and we all live on it.

I believe Susan Sontag took Americans--not American novelists but American pundits, who skew the conversation between American politicians and the American voters who put them in power--for failing to see precisely this in the wake of Sept. 11. To say that that 9/11 was a response to American actions is not the same thing as saying we deserved it, a point that many commentators seemed to deliberately misinterpret in Sontag's brief essay, although Rachel, in one of the most daring gambits in Netherland (really, Joe, I don't know how you got away with this), does seem to believe the World Trade Center attack was a caused by American actions, rather than those of a terrorist organizatin that, in the grand (dare I say global?) scene of things is pretty damn small. And, at the risk of closing on an even more distressing note than the one on which I began, I would say that one of the reasons why so many readers believed Sontag felt America got what it deserved, or at least what it had coming, was because on some level they, like Rachel, believed it themselves. Whatever the motivations of its authors, the phenomenon of global influence in American fiction has remained, for its readers, largely aesthetic. Of all the many reasons to celebrate the success of Netherland, one of the most heartening is sense of genuine connectedness it seems to have fostered between its American readers and the citizens of the rest of the planet. Maybe Chuck really was right. Maybe cricket really can save the world.