Netherland: A Novel
by Joseph O'Neill
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Book Reviews of Netherland: A Novel
Book Review: Authentic expat experience
Summary: 4 Stars
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.
Book Review: A heavy but charming examination of exile, friendship, and New York City
Summary: 4 Stars
Hans van den Broek is a man adrift. Recently separated from his wife Rachel, who has returned to her native England with the couple's young son, Hans is in his mid-30s and still living out of a suitcase in the Chelsea Hotel in 2003, a temporary situation that seems to have become permanent after Hans and Rachel fled their Tribeca loft in the wake of September 11, 2001.
Left behind by his family in a city that is not his home, Hans, a native Dutchman who has grown fabulously wealthy as an oil futures analyst in Manhattan, is still flummoxed by his quasi-adopted country and its inhabitants. And even as he attempts to make sense of everything from turns of phrase to the particularly aggressive style of the American walk signal at traffic lights, Hans tries to make sense of himself.
An analyst by trade, Hans is also an analyst by nature, noticing small details in the people and places he encounters, and devoting not insignificant efforts on analyzing himself, particularly the remoteness he feels not only from his family but also from his youthful self, one who had meaningful relationships, found joy in life and excelled at the sport of cricket.
So when Hans connects with an energetic, charismatic Trinidadian immigrant named Chuck Ramkissoon, his subsequent discoveries reconnect Hans not only with a little-known subculture of New York but also to his youthful past. Through Chuck, and with his involvement in the New York Cricket Club, Hans encounters immigrants from virtually every English-speaking country in the world as they meet for games on makeshift cricket fields carved out of every spare corner of the five boroughs and beyond. Hans's reunion with his beloved sport brings him back to his past, to his origins and possibly to himself.
NETHERLAND is Joseph O'Neill's third novel. A native of Ireland who has lived in the Netherlands for many years, O'Neill certainly understands the feeling of estrangement from one's own country as well as the feeling of being an alien in one's adopted homeland. The symbolism of exile is apparent throughout this elegiac, thoughtfully-paced novel --- not only in the shape of cricket but also in images of migratory birds, shifting ice floes, and the constantly moving and shifting population of New York City.
The city itself is practically a character in the novel, described alternately by Hans, the narrator, with grudging admiration, genuine fondness and a sense of loss as he prepares to leave the city forever. As the city moves through the seasons during the winter and spring of 2003 and beyond, the narrative alights on tiny moments --- a degrading incident at the DMV, a surprise sprout from a long-forgotten flower bulb, the reawakening of the city's homeless population --- that not only point to a profoundly observant understanding of the city but also mirror Hans's shifting consciousness.
Although NETHERLAND, with its meticulous details, heavy self-reflection and at times ponderous pace, may not be a novel for everyone, it will speak strongly to those who value carefully crafted sentences, wise observations and moments of startling insight.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
Book Review: Hans and Rachel
Summary: 4 Stars
Rachel, a lawyer, is unhappy in her marriage with Hans, an analyst at an investment bank. And so, the couple separates, with Rachel returning to London with Jake, their young son. While Hans visits his wife and son twice monthly, he spends most of his time alone in New York. He is depressed. He has no real friends.
In this life of isolation, Hans makes a serendipitous connection to the cricket community in New York, where he meets Chuck R., a naturalized citizen from the Caribbean. In this shabby new world of immigrant cricketers, Hans slowly develops a sense of community, where his new peers are the Pakistani guy who works at a gas station or the Hindu who drives a cab. Meanwhile, Chuck presents to Hans an image of entrepreneurial striving, which has qualities that are both inspiring and sleazy. Slowly, the world that grows from this cricket connection begins to exert its power on Hans. Then, he has a moment-of-truth and decides to return to London, resolving to win back his family.
In telling this story, O'Neill offers patches of writing that are wonderfully poetic. Perhaps, the best examples were presented in THE NEW YORKER review of NETHERLAND, which was written by the overpraising James Wood (How Fiction Works). At the same time, O'Neill is far from a flawless writer. He can, for example, be melodramatic:
"A hooting sob rose up from my chest. I began to gulp and pant. A deep and useless shame filled me--shame that I had failed my wife and son, shame that I lacked the means to fight on, to tell her that I refused to accept that our marriage had suddenly collapsed..."
And his prose occasionally verges on clunky.
"Rain spotted my window as we pulled away into the tunnels and gorges through which the Penn Station trains secretively dribble up the West Side."
Readers that find the greatest pleasure in NETHERLAND will be those interested in the marriage of Hans and Rachel. Those looking for a book about 9/11 will be disappointed, since the problems in this marriage preceded 9/11 and evolved without real connection to this horrible event. This, in fact, is something that O'Neill himself wryly acknowledges, with Hans identifying early in this novel the level where NETHERLAND truly operates. "All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women's magazines."
One final point: There are minor mistakes in this book that drove me crazy. Hans, for example, wouldn't work in a cubicle. (He's the fourth rated analyst in his specialty, according to INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS. This means his recommendations bring in big bucks and he gets an office.) Hans and Rachel taxi to Riverdale from the West Side using Broadway? Nope, they'd use the Henry Hudson. An investment banker and lawyer move into the Chelsea Hotel with their wee child after 9/11? NO WAY! (Go to Wikipedia and you'll see what I mean. This is not the place Yuppies go to recover from trauma.) And in Central Park, you'll never find Sheep's Meadow. But the Sheep Meadow is near Tavern on the Green.
Book Review: A Happy Ending for the West
Summary: 5 Stars
There is a lot to recommend in Netherland: Joseph O'Neil's elegant and propulsive prose, a magnificent tour of New York past and present, and a peek into the world of cricket. As intoxicating as these pleasures are, it's the narrative they embellish that proves the richest and most provocative element of Netherland. Here's the story in a nutshell: three-member family in crisis + high-rolling Wall Street dad + 9/11 + walk on the wild-side = family denouement. Sound familiar? How about an eerie echo of Don DeLillo's Falling Man? DeLillo isn't the only American author O'Neil finds ways to contact: There is Mark Twain: the relationship of the two main characters Hans and C. Ramkissoon bears a striking resemblance to Huck Finn and Jim, even though Ramkissoon also bears a striking resemblance to Jay Gatsby. Then there's the special men's world of cricket resonating with Bernard Malamoud's The Natural. What makes the novel so special is Joseph O'Neil's ability to dig into a long-standing American theme like race or sports through a technique of slipstreamed multiple narratives that complicate and update the vitality of those narratives. There's noting easy in the updates either: no happy ending to Hans and C. Ramkissoon's relationship; the lost-and-found Eden of The Natural transformed into the civilizing outcome of brutal empire. In both the overall similarities and the cracks of difference, O'Neil provides a methodology to expand communication beyond the words on the page and suggest a space for the reader to do what readers do best: create meaning.
Nowhere is the density or the troubling position of O'Neil's metaphors so finely etched as in the brilliant final set-piece, which takes place at the London Eye. At first glance, the choice of setting signifies the engineering and architectural triumph of the "New London," but exploring just a bit will reveal the Eye as part of the Millenial year, a celebration of the upcoming third (Christian) millennium. Not to stop there, Hans tracks all the way back to Greece, noting the sunset as "Phoebus...up to his oldest and best tricks." I'm guessing you're starting to see the picture. Unlike the grim detente of a new social order that closes Falling Man, O'Neil provides for a completely plausible happy ending for his family. There is certainly no greater testimonial to the lasting mythos and continuing resilience of the West than this scene of familial re-unification across generations. Don't get me wrong. O'Neal isn't pandering to Hollywood here; he's sharing the complicated world of his desire and asking you to come clean, to make a decision about the meaning of his book. Either you buy into the very idea of a happy ending and find sustenance in the forces of history and the peculiarly Western idea of progress, or you don't and read Netherland as boosterism for a culture that has wandered into the dust bin of history without even knowing it. I'm still deciding. (That's a good thing.)
Book Review: A complex, fascinating story written in elegant, mellifluous prose
Summary: 5 Stars
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.