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| Netherland: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Joseph O'neill
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
Buy New: $13.47
You Save: $10.48 (44%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  45 reviews
Sales Rank: 732
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.2
ISBN: 0307377040
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780307377043
ASIN: 0307377040
Publication Date: May 20, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 An extraordinary achievement May 20, 2008
10 out of 13 found this review helpful
O'Neill's novel is just marvelous. A poignant, funny and heart-wrenching account of events that unfold as a result of the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center. The fear, vulnerability and the sense of isolation that the attack exposes are palpable in passages of beautifully written prose. I found myself constantly pausing after paragraphs to reread and savor the author's descriptions.
The New York he describes is as authentic as any I have encountered in a novel: dreaded trips to the DMV are as dreadful as can be--creepy "performance artists" at the Time Square subway station are even more oppressive than the suffocating maze undergoing renovation. These "netherlands" and New York's Hudson Valley the original New Netherlands are juxtaposed to the mile high skyscrapers and Tribeca lofts that domicile the newest colonists.
Under the observant eye of Hans, a commodties analyst from the original Netherlands and his unlikely but entirely believable Trinidadian companion, Chuck, O'Neill explores the terrifying possibility of being alone in a city of eight million people. Loosely structured around their relationship to the game of cricket, Hans sets out to find something that will re-anchor and replace the sense of permanence he has lost.
I will never again hear the upstate town of Poughkeepsie pronounced without recalling the author's description as merry childish blurting. I probably will never go on Google Earth without experiencing something of the futility Hans feels as he "travels" to England each night to try to be near to the son who has gone home with Hans's wife. The technology, like his emotions will only let him get so close to family he aches for.
The entire book is what fiction does best: it is new and familiar at the same time. These characters are strangers and different yet just the same as yourself. Some reviewers have made a comparison Fitzgeralds's Gatsby which is apt. But for me, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland conjured up EM Forster's admonition in Howard's End: "Just connect....connect!".
 The ending left a lot to be desired May 22, 2008
8 out of 19 found this review helpful
In Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, Hans van der Broek is a Dutch-born/English resident who follows Rachael, his lawyer-wife to New York for a two-year stay. There he has no trouble landing a job as an oil banker/analyst.
The novel opens with the van der Broeks' departure and by page five, they are back in England, trying to make sense of some sad news. It seems that a reporter for the New York Times has called them to get some information on Hans' Trinidadian friend and mentor, Chuck Ramkisson, whose handcuffed "remains" have been found. Foul play is suspected.
From that revelation, the novel borders on a touch of mystery as it weaves back and forth (where O'Neill shows off his skill as a writer) between Hans' stay in America and his current life in England. But that thread of plot line is extremely limited.
Not long after the van der Broeks' settle into Manhattan, 9/11 occurs. They are forced to move into the Chelsea Hotel where their martial problems mount. Soon Rachel takes their son and returns to Britain to live with her parents.
Left behind, Hans stumbles his way onto a cricket field and meets Chuck. It seems there is an entire subculture of immigrant cricket players all over the peninsula. Chuck's dream is to reclaim cricket as America's original sport and remove its immigrant-stereotype shroud.
Speaking of stereotypes, O'Neill does a fabulous job in placing his novel nowhere near the typical New York scene. I saw a New York that I had never seen before. I also know more about cricket and what it takes to have the perfect playing field than I ever wanted to know.
The long, winding, and often rambling sentence structure functions as the gateway to the novels themes of disconnectedness and disenfranchisement. Still, the only thing that kept me reading was to know more about how Chuck ended up face down in a drainage ditch.
To say I was disappointed in the ending is an understatement. It was flat, and when I turned the final page, I was surprised to learn the story was over. No big aha moment, no epiphany, just a guy moseying through life.
Armchair Interviews says: Heed this reviewer's comments.
It still escapes us... June 22, 2008
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
If you are, like the rest of us, still searching for that post-9/11 epic that perfectly evokes the Zeitgeist of our present time, you will certainly be, as I was, disappointed with Mr. O'Neill's novel "Netherland." What the New York Times Book Review lauded as "Post 9/11, a New York of Gatsby-Size Dreams and Loss" is certainly a misleading epithet if not a downright lie. Indeed, comparing Mr. O'Neill's book to F. Scott Fitzgerald's chef-d'oeuvre is committing a terrible travesty. As critic Dwight Garner writes: "Joseph O'Neill's `Netherland' is not [the definitive 9/11] novel. It's too urbane, too small-boned, too savvy to carry much Dreiserian sweep and swagger." The novel's most apparent shortcoming is the static nature of its characters. Even the enigmatic, quote-unquote "Gatsby-like" character in the book--Chuck Ramkissoon--comes across as insipid, one-dimensional, and horribly banal. His cliche motto, "Think fantastic," is a far cry from Fitzgerald's complex and multi-layered characterization of Jay Gatsby. Although non-linear plots are a common phenomenon in modern literature, the plot of O'Neill's book is desultory, capricious, and irritatingly coreless. Whereas the disjointed plot of "The Great Gatsby" comes across as remarkably fluid owing to Fitzgerald's masterful style (a combination of short, concise descriptions, compelling dialogue, and lyrical passages), "Netherland" lacks cohesion as a result of underdeveloped characters, prosaic dialogue, and a writing style that vacillates between average and very good. The best (and worst) feature of "Netherland" is, of course, the many historical allusions that Mr. O'Neill makes to events of modern times: 9/11, the Israeli-Hezbollah War, the Great Blackout of 2003, the Iraq War, the failures of the Bush Administration, etc. "Netherland"'s most distinctive trait is, by far, the inclusion of these contemporary events into the narrative of Hans van den Broek. However, like many aspects of the book, these allusions seem too superficial and deliberate. For someone who professes multiple times throughout the story that he is not politically conscious, Hans seems uncannily aware of the politics of the post-9/11 era. It seems to me as though Mr. O'Neill constructed the "spirit of the times" around the story and not vice versa. That is to say he wrote the book from top-down instead of from the bottom up. This is ultimately why "Netherland," although an interesting attempt at evoking the post-9/11 Zeitgeist, fails to compel or captivate the reader.
i read it twice--first in gulps, and then in sips May 24, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
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.
FLYING DUTCHMAN July 29, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
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 emigres (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 fancy it's clear enough that if it had not been for that reason she would have found another.
This is the unfinished tale of a man whose emotions are genuine and deep - unfinished not (I hope) in the sense that there is going to be a sequel but because if anything is clear from the sequence of events here it is that neither Hans nor anyone else is likely to carry on from where the book leaves off in any placid nirvana. Hans's main characteristic is rationality. He is truthful with himself and can face up to his own shortcomings as he perceives them, but he is probably a bit too rational for his own good. If his life is going to be happy or fulfilled (whatever the latter might be in his case) that will only be so if others allow it to be. I found the whole novel to be one of the best and most involving that I have had the privilege of reading in years. I'm not myself inclined to read allegories or social/political messages into it. What this book possesses, for me, is human truth. The characterisation is exceptionally convincing, and it is helped by writing that I would describe as being of the highest quality. I do not normally have any great problem in putting novels down, but I certainly did with this one.
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