O'Neill's disappointing story and Amis's unreadable novel

Joseph O'Neill deservedly received a lot of attention for his breakout novel, Netherland, a really terrific book by all measures, and the good will he received from that book - not only the quality of that novel but his perfect NY literary life story, a guy w/ various law and business degrees who gave up the profession to write full time (not clear if spouse supported the family, but never mind) while living in the Chelsea Hotel w/ spouse and 3 boys (briefly mentioned in the novel) - and that good will has carried him through at least one poorly received novels and several appearances in the NYer. But his current story or short fiction if you will in the NYer, The Sinking of the Houston (or a title close to that) maybe pushes him to the limit. Here's a plot summary: Dad, father of 3 boys (spouse not mentioned) tells of various conversations w/ his teenage sons who seem to continuously ask him if he's aware of various political atrocities, such as the Duvalier family and the child soldiers in Liberia, and he gruffly puts them off. One day one of the boys tells him he's been robbed at gunpoint on the subway; robber took his cell phone and $. Narrator uses a "find my phone" app and locates the perpetrator, and determines to track him down and break his legs. Took the story a while (about half its length) to get to this point, but now I'm aboard. Eventually perp appears in narrator's neighborhood, and he grabs a baseball bat and goes to get him - but at doorway he's waylaid by a friendly neighbor who walks with him and tells him his back story: he was a member of the team of Cuban exiles that invaded the Bay of Pigs back in the 60s. Narrator listens to this tale - and story ends. What the hell? Does he go after the guy? If not why not? What happened? Did O'Neill just stop? Is this a piece from a longer work? If so, why not at least make it a completed piece? Not sure whom to blame here: O'Neill's writing is really good, so maybe the NYer editors made a bad decision. Don't know.

On another front, Martin Amis's 1989 novel, London Fields, gets no better on 2nd night of laborious reading. Not only don't we care about the characters (the murderer and, as Amis quaintly calls her, the murderee) he doesn't even want us to care about them, as he continues w/ he "framing story" about the American writer who's writing the tale we're reading. And the style is so cumbersome. Here's an illustration (though much shorter than usual) roughly recalled: It was lower caste, low caste, untouchable. Well, which? Give us one - don't say the same thing repeatedly. I'm not writing off Amis; from other things I've read he seems to be a top-flight novelist. But this novel was no doubt of its time, but in some ways the last gasp of the self-conscious postmodernism that flared and died in English-language fiction in the late 20th century. Today, it feels almost unreadable.

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