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Friday December 4th, 2009

America Now, Compressed

netherlandOver at the Huffington Post, Second Pass contributor Alexander Nazaryan makes the case for the novel he thinks best represents the first decade of the century:

No novel better captures the background dread of everyday life these days—terrorism jitters, credit-default swaps, mutant flu strains—than Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Like The Great Gatsby—to which it bears obvious resemblance—Netherland compresses the American experience into a critical mass, and then proceeds to pick it apart. . . . Netherland has been called a post 9-11 novel, but that isn’t quite true: it is a post-American novel, announcing the conclusion of what Time founder Henry Luce called in 1941 the American Century.