Netherland

We have to be careful with ethnic stereotypes these days, but perhaps it can be suggested without giving offence that the image of the Dutch bourgeoisie is one of rationality, level-headedness and emotions under control. Almost without exception in my experience, their command of English is perfect and they fit perfectly into careers in English-speaking nations. The narrator of Netherland is exactly such a Dutchman. In his career he is an effortless high-flyer, when separated from his wife and child he flies fortnightly to London from Niew Amsterdam to visit them without a financial qualm or any seeming sense of fatigue or jet-lag, he joins his family at a moment's notice and without any apparent change of pace in a holiday in Kerala, and his receptive imagination takes flight to Trinidad as well. What is striking about Hans is that although a lot happens to him he is never the initiator of anything that happens. First his marriage falls apart, then by the end of the book it is getting together again, but his wife is the driver of both events. Intelligent, thoughtful and successful he may be, capable of a formidable amount of emotional resilience too, but tagging along like a tame dog in his wife's turbulent wake. Three extra-marital liaisons are mentioned, one in some detail. In this the woman seduces him, and when she then breaks off contact that's that and she is never even mentioned again. With the other two it seems to have been a similar story. Nothing of this nature is anywhere near as important to him as the game of cricket it seems. If anything in this superb novel strikes me as a little overdone it is the lengthy and loving musings on the great sport of the British Empire. It is only quite recently that I became aware that Holland and Ireland are making determined efforts to break into the imperial monopoly. Just how deep-rooted their love of the game is I am now beginning to understand from this tale put into the mouth of a Dutchman by an Irish author. Cricket in America seems to be a game for either English émigrés (as in Waugh) or immigrants (as here). It is starting to follow soccer in being a big-money game, but the place where the money is to be made is clearly not the USA but India. Apart from the marriage/family theme, the other main narrative is of Hans's partial involvement, typically cautious, prompted and reactive on his part, with a cricket-minded immigrant entrepreneur who strongly recalls Gatsby, not least in the man's fate mentioned at the outset and partially explained near the end. I did not really find anything amounting to a theme with regard to 9/11 or the conflict in Iraq. They are mentioned because that is the timeframe in which the story is set and it would have been rather coy if they had not been referred to in a story largely taking place in New York, but the mentions are brief and incidental. It is true that Rachel cites the post-9/11 atmosphere as her reason for taking their son away from New York, but I

The book jacket of the hard-bound edition is entrancingly deceptive. Printed on what feels like watercolor paper, it shows a colored vignette of men in white playing cricket on a village green watched by spectators relaxing in the shade of a spreading chestnut tree. It could well be the nineteenth century, except that the skyline in the background is Manhattan, and Joseph O'Neill's novel is set in the first years of the present century. Written in a style of such lucidity that it might almost be an autobiographical memoir, it is the narrative of three years or so in New York City. The protagonist Hans van den Broek, a Dutch-born financial analyst, thirtyish and near the top of his profession, arrives there at the start of the millennium with Rachel, his English wife, herself a high-powered lawyer. But after the attacks of 9/11, Rachel returns to England with their infant son. Hans stays on. On one level, this is a novel of displacement. Having already relocated to London from Holland, Hans makes the further move to New York, where both he and Rachel prosper. But they have to evacuate their loft apartment after the attacks, and move into temporary quarters in the Chelsea Hotel, which is portrayed as an almost-surreal world unto itself. So Hans is essentially rootless before the story truly starts. By sheer chance, he stumbles upon the fact that cricket is played in New York by scratch teams of immigrants from former British colonies: Indians, Pakistanis, Caribbeans. Hans, who learned the game at an exclusive school in Holland, becomes the only white member of a team formed of taxi-drivers, store-keepers, and small businessmen, who offer him a kind of camaraderie that he cannot find among his professional colleagues. Although cricket is an important symbolic presence, it plays a relatively minor part in the action, and it is not necessary for the reader to know the game. At first, cricket is presented as a symbol of the immigrant subculture, the thing that both brings people together and emphasizes their differences from mainstream America. As a successful Wall Street banker, Hans might be expected to fit right into New York society -- and indeed the author makes the point that, as a Dutchman, he is actually a member of the historic first tribe of New York. But in soul-crushing scenes at the DMV and INS that might have been penned by Kafka, but which any victim of American bureaucracy will recognize, O'Neill does not spare Hans some of the worst aspects of the immigrant experience. Hans spends the first part of the book in a cultural limbo; when he joins the team, he find that most of his old skills come back, but he cannot bring himself to modify his patrician batting form in order to hold his own with players who learned in dirt lots; by his final American cricket game, he is hitting out with reckless abandon. The English have an expression, "It's not cricket," when something contravenes an unstated social law. Later in the book, Hans remarks:

The book jacket is entrancingly deceptive. Printed on what feels like watercolor paper, it shows a colored vignette of men in white playing cricket on a village green watched by spectators relaxing in the shade of a spreading chestnut tree. It could well be the nineteenth century, except that the skyline in the background is Manhattan, and Joseph O'Neill's novel is set in the first years of the present century. Written in a style of such lucidity that it might almost be an autobiographical memoir, it is the narrative of three years or so in New York City. The protagonist Hans van den Broek, a Dutch-born financial analyst, thirtyish and near the top of his profession, arrives there at the start of the millennium with Rachel, his English wife, herself a high-powered lawyer. But after the attacks of 9/11, Rachel returns to England with their infant son. Hans stays on. On one level, this is a novel of displacement. Having already relocated to London from Holland, Hans makes the further move to New York, where both he and Rachel prosper. But they have to evacuate their loft apartment after the attacks, and move into temporary quarters in the Chelsea Hotel, which is portrayed as an almost-surreal world unto itself. So Hans is essentially rootless before the story truly starts. By sheer chance, he stumbles upon the fact that cricket is played in New York by scratch teams of immigrants from former British colonies: Indians, Pakistanis, Caribbeans. Hans, who learned the game at an exclusive school in Holland, becomes the only white member of a team formed of taxi-drivers, store-keepers, and small businessmen, who offer him a kind of camaraderie that he cannot find among his professional colleagues. Although cricket is an important symbolic presence, it plays a relatively minor part in the action, and it is not necessary for the reader to know the game. At first, cricket is presented as a symbol of the immigrant subculture, the thing that both brings people together and emphasizes their differences from mainstream America. As a successful Wall Street banker, Hans might be expected to fit right into New York society -- and indeed the author makes the point that, as a Dutchman, he is actually a member of the historic first tribe of New York. But in soul-crushing scenes at the DMV and INS that might have been penned by Kafka, but which any victim of American bureaucracy will recognize, O'Neill does not spare Hans some of the worst aspects of the immigrant experience. Hans spends the first part of the book in a cultural limbo; when he joins the team, he find that most of his old skills come back, but he cannot bring himself to modify his patrician batting form in order to hold his own with players who learned in dirt lots; by his final American cricket game, he is hitting out with reckless abandon. The English have an expression, "It's not cricket," when something contravenes an unstated social law. Later in the book, Hans remarks: "I cannot be the first to

This book has been reviewed so extensively and lavishly that I wonder if I actually have anything to add. Here is what I loved about Netherland: those of us fortunate enough to live in New York typically take great pleasure in the multiple layers of life and experience we find here. No matter who we are, we are constantly reminded that we are only one of thousands of unique stories walking the sidewalks of this city and riding the trains. Netherland is a beautiful reminder of this--it takes readers outside of their own experience and says, "Consider this!" I enjoyed it less for the 9/11 connection, which is not in my mind all that important to the plot, than for the reminder of what is extraordinary about this city. I galloped through the first reading, knowing full well I'd go back to savor it again. The writing really is lyrical--that is no exaggeration. Just when you think English has been fully exploited in all the most beautiful ways, along comes another writer who does it again. Many sentences have the humor and beauty of Mark Helprin at his best. Living in Chelsea makes this story special for me, but it will resonate with readers far afield for other reasons having to do with love, dreams, and dislocation. Don't miss it.

Reading this novel gave me great pleasure. In contrast to its plain cover, this marvelous novel, written in mellifluous and elegant prose, is complex; its world sprawling and vast, with mind-boggling depth. After reading only two pages, I found myself charmed by its narrator's voice, and my mind glued to its world. On the surface it is the story of its narrator, a banker named Hans van den Broek , born and raised in Netherlands, and working in London. While working in London in a bank, he meets an Englishwoman named Rachel and marries her. They have a son named Jake. In 1990's, they relocate to New York and live in TriBeCa. After the terrorist attack on the Word Trade Center on 9/11, however, they relocate again, and decide to live in the Chelsea Hotel. But Rachel's fear of another terrorist attack and the toxic political atmosphere in the United States create stress in their marriage, and the stress in turn compels Rachel to move with her son, once again, back to London. Underneath this story, there is another story about a Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon. Ramkissoon is a shady character. He runs a fraudulent and illegal numbers racket. But like many men, even a man from the under-world, he has big ambitions and a dream of starting a world-class cricket field and cricket club in Staten Island and of turning cricket into a national sport in America. The third story inter-woven with the other two is the story of the game cricket itself and its ardent players at the Staten Island Cricket Club, immigrants from countries such as Sri Lanka, Trinidad, Bahamas, and other tropical countries. Mr. O'Neill weaves the three strands into a lovely braid, his lyrical prose serving as an adornment, like a rope of fragrant jasmine that often adorns a braid in tropical lands. The most striking feature of this novel, without a doubt, is Mr. O'Neill's elegant and flowing prose, smooth and free from jarring edges and ripples, and as lovely as the very best I have read in my fifty years of romance with the English language: "The day was thick as a jelly, with a hot, glassy atmosphere and no wind, not even a breeze from the Kill of Kull, which flows less than two hundred yards from Walker Park and separates Staten Island from New Jersey. Far away, in the south, was the mumbling of thunder. It was the kind of barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows cast by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe, yearn even for those days when you play cricket wearing two sweaters under a cold sky patched here and there by a blue tatter -- enough to make a sailor's pants, as my mother used to say." Mr. O'Neill's command over the English language is such that his long sentences have the miraculous property of never annoying the reader. In fact, they tickle the reader's mind and induce great pleasure.