In Amsterdam
Tim Winton's "The Riders" and a postcard from the city of canals, 'coffee houses,' stroopwafel, and the three saltires of St. Andrews
Hello from Amsterdam 🇳🇱
She wondered if you could love someone too much. If you could it wasn't fair. People didn't have a chance. Love was all you had in the end. It was like sleep, like clean water. When you fell off the world there was still love because love made the world. That's what she believed. That's how it was.
—Tim Winton, The Riders
My favorite book about Amsterdam is written by an Australian and is set in Ireland as much as it is Amsterdam. This is partly because my knowledge of Dutch literature is extremely limited and partly because The Riders, by Tim Winton is a really good book—good enough to represent more than one country. We do what we can with what we have.
Winton is one of the most celebrated of contemporary Australian writers and, notably, still lives in Australia, which matters to me and definitely matters to Australians. To illustrate, my thesis advisor at Australian university once said about the man who is arguably Australia’s most famous author, Peter Carey, “can you really call someone an Aussie if, on getting their first real royalty check, they fuck off to London and are never heard from?”
I learned about Winton because of his novel, Cloudstreet, which was the book most recommended to me during my time in that country: five minutes after I arrived, and for the rest of my years there, almost any conversation about my being an American who liked books and had moved to Australia included an admonition to read Cloudstreet. Which I did, and it is, as promised, a wonderful book. It’s an epic, comedic, two-family drama set in Perth over a couple of decades that is possibly a cousin to Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections—only funnier and in a much more interesting setting. Highly recommend.
The Riders is the one I loved, though, and the one I’ve read a couple of times since first reading it in the late 90s. Even one of Winton’s more recent novels, the phenomenal, Breathe, a finely observed novel about surfing, sex, love and coming of age, hasn’t displaced The Riders. I cannot write about Breathe, because the only person who should write about that book is my friend Michele, who, on reading it, wrote to Winton with a lengthy and, I think, somewhat anguished, reply and received a lengthy reply back, which I hope she someday writes about. (Are you reading Michele? Your guest spot on SBB is waiting for you.)
But, I can write a bit about The Riders, just enough so as not to spoil the page-turner of a plot, with the hope that you will decide to read it too.
Scully, the main character, is an Aussie who’s a bit rough around the edges in the way that Ausssies like to be—somewhat defiantly, that is—who, when the story opens, has gone ahead of his wife and daughter to fix up a house in Ireland to which they plan to immigrate. But, when the day comes for him to pick them up at the airport, only his small daughter Billie turns up, and she’s too young, upset, and frightened to be able to explain why she’s arrived without her mother. Scully is the kind of capable guy who prefers to solve problems his own way and with his own two hands, and so that’s what he does; the rest of the novel is scene upon scene of Scully in action, moving from place to place, from clue to clue, all the while trying to take care of a small, increasingly exhausted child.
They criss-cross Europe by the time the book is finished, but it’s in a houseboat in Amsterdam that a key piece of the puzzle falls into place.
In Scully’s frenetic and haunted search for his missing spouse lies a metaphor for what we do in our heads when what we thought was our life turns out to be something other than predictable and reliable. Scully wants his wife to provide the concrete answers and emotional guarantees that he believed were bedrock, and part of what the book is about is that when it comes to the vicissitudes of the human heart, there is no such solid ground.
Thanks for traveling with me this week!
Next week will be a two-for-one. A guest post and an excerpt from the memoir-in-progress, Socially Distanced (one on Sunday, one on Monday).
Here are some other things you can do:
Follow | Get the t-shirt | Buy Books | Read the Archive | Share
Catching up on Survival By Book. Love this one.