A document of our time | Netherland: A Novel

book: Netherland: A Novel | Joseph O'Neill

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	• Netherland: A Novel Joseph O'Neill Pantheon, 2008 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 52 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Authentic expat experience

The story begins with the protagonist, Hans van den Broek who is a Holland native living in London with his wife and son, reminiscing about his time spent living for a few years in New York and wondering whatever happened to a West Indian friend he made there named Chuck Ramkissoon. Such details go a long way to explain how cricket can produce such cultural fusion when it becomes part of the expatriate experience, taking comfort in something old and familiar and treasuring it when thrown into a whole new world.

The novel deals a lot with the awkwardness of life after 9/11 and feeling out of place in the world, not knowing how to proceed with day-to-day activities after a life-changing event. The story can be hard to follow at times as it unfolds in a unique anachronistic style that more closely resembles stream of consciousness as opposed to flashbacks or reflections. But one of the book's biggest strengths, and what makes it feel authentic, lies in the attention to detail and experiences that could only be known by an expat, and especially one who plays cricket.

There are other little anecdotes too, like the great northeast summer blackout of 2003 and the Thanksgiving Day parade balloon characters that blew out of control in the wind that same year. They make the reader get involved and relate to how Hans experienced these events. People from the New York metro area will appreciate moments like these more than others, which is absolutely fine because it adds more character to the story.

But I suppose the best and most vivid element of the book is Hans' relations with the people around him, especially immigrants. Hans is the only white player in any of the matches he ever plays in. Writing this review as a white American cricketer, this is very believable. There has been one time in three years where an opponent had a white player in their team, an Australian at a match in Kansas. Hans meets Chuck, a black Trinidadian who at the time is an umpire. In part through Chuck's knowledge of the local communities, Hans comes across people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the West Indies, and Sri Lanka. Most of Hans' fellow players have low paying jobs and live in poor run down areas of Brooklyn and the other boroughs. It generally isn't possible to find Australian or English or Kiwi expats playing cricket in the US, because more often than not, these people are white and they fit in seamlessly with the rest of mainstream America. It is a different story for almost all non-white immigrants. They have to stick together if they want to survive and one of the ways to do that is building around a sport, in this case with cricket. Hans is all alone though. His family has left him and his job just is. He tries to fit in with America by joining a fantasy football pool with the night staff at the Chelsea Hotel, his current residence, but it is beyond him. So he crosses over the cultural divide of America to get back into something he knows, the culture of cricket.

Netherland has the requisite twists and turns of any good plot to keep readers on their toes. O'Neill also has a creative, 21st century approach to writing about relationships and love. It definitely makes the book original. However, what makes it worth reading is its authenticity, something that is as hard to accomplish as keeping the ball on the ground when playing cricket in America.

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A document of our time

When this book was published in the spring of 2008, it received wonderful reviews, most notably in May on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Book Review Magazine. The usually difficult and persnickety Michiko Kakutani also gave it high marks in another review in the Times' daily edition. It was therefore a surprise when the book was ignored by the Booker Prize, not even making the long list for the prestigious award in England.

This is a complex novel, moving along the timeline between a few weeks after September 11, 2001 and three years later, when the upheaval created by the terrorist attack starts to become a healing memory with persistent repercussions. Details of life and the mindset in New York and of the U.S. at large are nicely detailed, but the most compelling narrative is the way the terrorist attack disrupts and almost anihilates the marriage of the protagonist.

Interwoven with the marriage break-up is the main character's pursuit of the game of cricket in New York, and his involvement with a shady character who wants to popularize the game in the U.S. What's the connection between the two story lines? The main character is Dutch, reared in England, and finds in cricket a civility and a comfort that has been denied him since the departure of his wife back to her native England after September 11.

Joseph O'Neill is wonderful writer. His prose is sure-footed even as it jumps from future to present to past, never confusing the reader, and always with near-poetic language that is beautiful as well as evocative of the action on the page. Let's hope the National Book Awards later this year (2008) recognize this tremendous achievement.

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In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans--a banker originally from the Netherlands--finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, introduces Hans to an ?other? New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality. Hans is alternately seduced and instructed by Chuck?s particular brand of naivete and chutzpah--by his ability to a hold fast to a sense of American and human possibility in which Hans has come to lose faith.

Netherland gives us both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger, and brilliantly achieved ambition: the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st century America from an outsider?s vantage point, and the complicated relationship between the American dream and the particular dreamers. Most immediately, though, it is the story of one man--of a marriage foundering and recuperating in its mystery and ordinariness, of the shallows and depths of male friendship, of mourning and memory. Joseph O?Neill?s prose, in its conscientiousness and beauty, involves us utterly in the struggle for meaning that governs any single life.

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