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.

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Thanks again to everybody for talking an interest this last week, and for the generosity of judgment shown not only to my novel, but also to my rather airy speculations. Finally, anybody interested in a watching a game of New York cricket might want to consider Progressive CC v Staten Island CC at Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn, tomorrow, 2 pm. All being well, I'll be there.

I, too, would like to join Kurt in congratulating Joe on being long-listed for the Booker price and being made the early favourite. American writers may be disempowered domestically but their stock is possibly higher internationally. Certainly this is the case with Philip Roth who, if the Booker Prize were open to Americans, would have won it two, three or four times in the last dozen years.

Meanwhile, and more immediately, there are two fantastic Test matches in play at the moment. In Sri Lanka there is a finely balanced match in which the hosts may defeat India thanks to a new bewitching 'mystery spinner' called Mendis. And in Birmingham England and South Africa are engaged in the tightest of struggles.

Editor's Note: This is a googly.

Interesting: what Joe says about growing up in Europe, entranced by Bellow and other mid-century American novelists, is precisely the same thing Ian McEwan said not long ago when I asked about his influences as he was deciding to become a writer. And even more interesting, maybe, is that at that very same moment the American novelist was becoming disempowered domestically. That is, Bellow, Mailer, Updike and Roth were culturally central in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s and 70s in a way that no novelist has been since.

"How to meet this challenge?" asks Joe of the withering of America's global cultural hegemony. Well, one way for a lot of writers, inevitably, will be to embrace one's Homie-ness, and write well about America for Americans. As 95% of writers in 95% of the countries on earth do. And imperial twilight can be a great subject, as Forster proved.

Speaking (as Mia did) of "who and what makes an American writer or a British one" and "upcoming Irish writers of note," let me offer a (virtual) toast to that Irish-born, British-educated, American-resident writer Joe O'Neill, who made the Man Booker Prize longlist the other day.

Being trained as a literature specialist and receiving a Ph.D. in English Literature forces one to make geographical decisions about specialization (Comparative Literature folks have more geographical and linguistic flexibility). For me, that choice was wrenching to make and I still try to work around these divisions, rather than within them. In general, one chooses to specialize as an Americanist or British literature scholar. Sub-specialties give one the flexibility to move a bit beyond the borders of the Big Two--which are already multiple, really. Nowadays more exciting Americanist scholars work on The Americas--North (including Canada, of course, that land of many great writers--Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry just to name a few), South, and Central America. British scholars also work on more than English Literature; British can mean that one works on Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and what used to be called Commonwealth Literatures--the literature written in English from former colonial territories. Postcolonial is used now, but that, too, is one of those troubling and unfeasible, but current terms.

Both of these more recent, trans-regional approaches have been historically and ideologically influenced; looking at the larger Americas, enables one to look at the political, historical, and ideological currents that have underwritten the story of The Americas: for example, Manifest Destiny and they ways in which that myth unfolds (a too gentle term), differently, upon the continents peoples; Pax Americana (national 'peace' built upon commercial expansionism and military might) borrowed from British models of expansionism (Pax Brittanica), and its continuing relevance even in George Bush's America. The ways in which literatures are studied and taught changes with the times and I think that we will see the Big Two model--British and American--continue to mutate, as will our ideas about who and what makes and American writer or a British one. But more and more writers will have mixed affiliations and national and cultural inheritances--that seems a 21st century certainty.

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Yes!

Partly out of sheer awe at my fellow contributors and their brains, let me tilt this discussion in a slightly more homespun direction.

Power clearly has a literary consequence: when the British ruled the world, the nuances of provincial bourgeois life in, say, Leicestershire exerted (and continue to exert) a worldwide fascination. Growing up in 1970/80s Europe, as I did, nothing seemed more relevant than the spaces inhabited by Bellow or Ellison or Updike's characters: never mind that I had zero knowledge of, or much intrinsic interest in, American Jewish intellectual life or the plight of black Americans or what a WASP was. As the global economic and cultural domination of the United States is replaced, to a significant degree, by the domination of transnational capital and whatever cultural stuff sticks to it (surely we can agree on the existence of this phenomenon?), is it not inevitable that the privileges hitherto enjoyed by American fiction will follow the money and drift elsewhere? This is exactly what's happened in cricket, as Will points out, where Indians now control (and transform) a sport that was previously the fiefdom of the English. And the Chinese art market is another obvious case in point.

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I am weak on globalization, and can't help you much with post national theory, but I have watched cricket for a while. And the role cricket plays in Netherland, and Joe's descriptions of the game, are two of the many joys of the book.

Cricket, once the most traditional of sports, is fast becoming the most modern of games. In its original Test match format it was a contest that fostered complexity and subtlety. Watching cricket provided a satisfying way to keep time in abeyance. You could happily sit for seven or eight hours and something significant might happen, or it might not. After five days the game would, more often than not, end in a draw.

Yet the lack of a trite result did not prevent many narratives being played out. It is no coincidence that cricket, rather than unthinking, brand heavy, football, is the preferred sport of nearly all of Britain's pre-eminent playwrights (Pinter, Stoppard, Hare, Gray...). In 'The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games' Ashis Nandy writes 'cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English'. It possessed a fatalism which was once suited to the Indian temperament.

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I thought blogging was all about writing short. Dale has just posted almost 2,000 words. And his arguments are smart and subtle to boot. Allow me to ignore the absurdly high bar he has set.

The very idea of the national character of works of fiction is a slippery thing. Try the thought experiment of removing or altering the geographic and cultural particulars of this or that great novel, and a lot of those books - maybe most - cease seeming so "American" or "English" or "Russian." This first occurred to me not long after I graduated college, freshly filled with the notion of national literatures as virtually scientific categories, when I read A Confederacy of Dunces. That book, for all of its balls-out, funny-tragic artifacts of "Americanism," reminded me of Don Quixote...and I got to thinking how Confederacy of Dunces could work just as well if it were set in, say, Malaga instead of New Orleans...which in turn got me to thinking that Don Quixote is, well, a very American story, a serious comedy about falsehood versus reality and nobility of character and a picaresque journey-cum-dreamquest that Mark Twain didn't happen to write.

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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.

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The extract of Netherland's Hans looking at Chuck's cricket field from the satellite-enabled perspective of Google Maps with which Joseph O'Neill initiated this conversation is a vivid representation of the some of the contemporary and complex ways in which individuals connect with places, myriad connected and distinct patches of earth across memory, time, and space. In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), the anthropologist and cultural critic Arjun Appadurai identifies these border-crossing (post-national?--a term I resist) technological, economic, linguistic, communal, and cultural sites of disconnection and re-connection as a series of interlocking dimensions, as dynamic, shifting, evolving, unfolding processes.

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Joseph O'Neill poses an important question about the American narrative point of view. When I read Netherland about a month ago, I had the distinctive sense that all of the characters were both desperate for a sense of home and yet condemned to be world citizen's. Hans and his wife struggle with living in post 9/11 New York. The wife abandons the struggle and Hans, left alone in the Chelsea Hotel, is a man without a country. As for Chuck, the Carribean Immigrant, full of American Dreams of expanding Cricket--he feels like a later day version of The Great Gatsby, but without the mansion.

Speaking of Gatsby, it does seem to me the both Fitzgerald and Hemingway wrestled with this sense of being a global expatriate in the 1920's. Societies are often cruel to their artists, because the artists job is to say no to the prevailing cultural/consumption wisdom. The wonderful characters that populate Netherland are just looking for a way to hold their heads up in a world of myriad compromises. It's not an easy task.

First of all, I'd like to thank Lila and TPM for instigating this discussion of Netherland. Thanks also to my fellow bloggers for agreeing to take part.

Let's start with a short extract from close to the end of Netherland. The London-based narrator, Hans, travels by Google Maps to New York in search of a cricket field which he and his deceased friend, Chuck, once tried to build together in Brooklyn:

I track the shore. Gravesend and Gerritsen slide by, and there is Floyd Bennett Field's geometric sprawl of runways. I fall again, as low as I can. There's Chuck's field. It is brown--the grass has burned--but it is still there. There's no trace of a batting square. The equipment shed is gone. I'm just seeing a field. I stare at it for a while. I am contending with a variety of reactions, and consequently with a single brush on the touchpad I flee upward into the atmosphere and at once have in my sights the physical planet, submarine wrinkles and all--have the option, if so moved, to go anywhere. From up here, though, a human's movement is a barely intelligible thing. Where would he move to, and for what? There is no sign of nations, no sense of the so-called work of man. The U.S.A. as such is nowhere to be seen.

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Happy Monday Cafe-ers!

As you may have noticed by glancing at the banners on the right side of TPMCafe, we've got some exciting new things happening this week. Novelist Joseph O'Neill is joining us for a Book Club discussion on his new book Netherland. I'm particularly excited about this because it's the first TPMCafe discussion on a novel (!) and because I found the book particularly beautiful, politically relevant and worthy of further discussion. Joining him will be novelist and critic Dale Peck, New York Magazine writer Kurt Andersen, Mia Carter professor of English at University of Texas at Austin and Will Buckley of The Guardian. Joe's first post will be up in an hour or so, and I'll let him introduce the argument.

Also at Cafe all week, Chris Hayes will be joining us for a discussion on his recent Nation article, "MoveOn at Ten." Discussing with him will be Eli Pariser, director of MoveOn.org, Ben Brandzel, founder of MoveOn Student Action, Matt Stoller, a political consultant and blogger, John Stauber, founder of the Center for Media and Democracy and Marshall Ganz, public policy lecturer at Harvard University.

We're going to be digging in to some meaty stuff, and I think that both conversations have a real timely relevance as we move towards the election, and think about the direction that American politics, and American communities, are heading in. And the work that needs to be done. Join us!