For my final post, I would like to thank Joe O'Neill and Lila Shapiro for inviting me to participate in TPM Book Cafe's initial discussion of a fictional work. Joe's Netherland was a great choice and the other panelists' and readers' posts made me think of all of the ways in which I admire and appreciate the novel (I love it, really; the postings made me want to read it for the third time, and soon). Dale's post and his discussion of Melville's Moby Dick and Twain's Huckleberry Finn has kept me thinking about these wandering writers, their circuitous routes and journeys, tinkerings and borrowings.

The discussion of the American Dream with which we began reveals some of the traces of literary borrowing; I am not sure that the national landscape is ever as stable a foundation for the novel as we sometimes believe. Border-crossing and cross-pollination has been part of the novel's heritage, and most other literary genres', as well (Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was influenced by his Italian travels and encounter with Boccaccio's Decameron during the Italian Renaissance, for example; Huck and Jim are related in some way to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza). The American Dream narrative has its roots in the pilgrimage or quest and the picaresque; writers are distant as Homer, Chaucer, or Cervantes can be considered the forebears of Twain, Kerouac, or Cormac McCarthy. The road tradition and the theme of mobility in American fiction are expressive exercises in searching for the meaning, the possibilities and the limitations of the American Dream. McCarthy's The Road had me silently weeping on an airplane, as I finished it en route from AP test grading in Louisville last summer; that novel's post-apocalyptic journey across the ruined American landscape had a great many dark, Cassandra-like things to say about where we are and where, as a nation, we could be heading. Joe's Netherland has a broader view and, it seems to me, a more hopeful, though fragilely hopeful vision.

The scenes that linger for me are Hans' final bike ride across the Brooklyn Bridge and NYC with his mother on her first and last trip to America before she dies (that death rocks Hans and Rachel's marriage and stable sense of the world before 9/11--something that reminds one of our shared vulnerabilities in the face of loss); the Google maps scenes and their connection to Hans' memory of the Dutch fishing trip and awareness of his smallness in the universe--the story that makes Rachel fall in love with him; and the small beauties Hans discovers in his rides and walks across the city with the captivating Ramkissoon, like the iridescent green-purple shimmering tones around the humble pigeons' necks that Chuck makes visible to Hans' eyes. Netherland reminds the reader of the perhaps necessary imperfection of our national and existential dreams and desires; as Hans notes, "But surely everyone can also testify to another, less reckonable kind of homesickness, one having to do with unsettlements that cannot be located in spaces of geography or history..." (120). Serious fiction and those committed, tinkering writers and world citizens enable us to explore unsettlement, and to see where such a feeling can take us.

Hearty, joyful, yeehaw congratulations on the Mann Booker Prize longlist nomination, Joe! And thanks to you fellow respondents, Dale, Will and Kurt, and the TPM Book Cafe community for a very enriching and pleasurable week.