I’ve been reading Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which is a novel about many things, but largely about detachment and loss. It’s concerned with those things which were a part of our world, once, but are not now and cannot be again. In O’Neill’s novel we find Dutch-born Hans van den Broek in the strange and tense setting of New York immediately post‑9/11. Like the New York skyline, Hans is experiencing the emptiness that follows loss, the sensation that something is wrong, something is missing. Estranged from the structure and support of family, friends, a home or a purpose, Hans is detached from anything meaningful, anything […]