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| Netherland: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Joseph O'neill
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
Buy New: $10.97
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New (48) Used (19) Collectible (8) from $8.49
Avg. Customer Rating:  52 reviews
Sales Rank: 1314
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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Product Description
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 47 more reviews...
 Cricket in Purgatory June 11, 2008
56 out of 62 found this review helpful
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 wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice." That "imagining" is important; O'Neill gently suggests that America's image as the champion of justice has become tarnished in the last few years. But he is also framing the moral dichotomy of the novel. The other major character in the story is a black Trinidadian immigrant, Chuck Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who thinks big and maintains a finger in every pie. At the very beginning of the book (which is all told in flashbacks), Hans learns of Chuck's death in what seems like a mob killing. But his first chronological appearance in the story is when, as the umpire for a cricket match, he defuses a potentially dangerous situation, and follows it up with a clubhouse speech that is both a defence of the highest ideals of cricket and a potential vision of America as the Promised Land. Chuck has grandiose plans to build an international cricket stadium in New York, and he enlists Hans into furthering his vision. But he also has shady activities on the side, whose nature only gradually becomes clear. In dealing with these two sides of Chuck's character, Hans gradually comes to re-examine his own moral sense, identity, and priorities.
But NETHERLAND is no mere novel of ideas; it is also an emotionally wrenching love-story. For most of the book, the marriage of Hans and Rachel is virtually non-existent. When she leaves him, it is clear that she needs to escape more than the physical dangers of the bombed city. Hans flies to London every two weeks to see his son, but his relations with Rachel are painfully distant. And yet the novel opens some years later, with the two of them back together again, and apparently happy. Amazingly, O'Neill makes the fact that "you know how it all comes out" into a source of more tension, not less. The days in New York between Rachel's decision and her actual departure are agonizing and so so true. And even when Hans leaves America and returns to London for good, the story is far from over; there is love to be found, but it must be new-forged, and it does not come easily. At one point towards the end of his stay in America (in Las Vegas, no less), Hans talks of reaching absolute bottom. But it is not Hell that he has been through, rather a very special kind of Purgatory.
The author Sebastian Barry, in a comment quoted on the back cover, writes: "The dominant sense is of aftermath, things flying off under the impulse of an unwanted explosion, and the human voice calling everything back." Without that human voice, this story might merely be an offbeat curiosity. But O'Neill, with his clear moral compass and extraordinary power of writing from the heart, has created what may be the most moving book I have read all year.
 Gorgeous words, sober phrases, unfulfilled centre May 26, 2008
45 out of 69 found this review helpful
Every year brings out a '9-11' novel, usually by white people. Well, the pattern certainly has established its own genre requirements . . . an elegy for New York's global invulnerability, a meditation on American power dynamics, and the 'Babel' like intricacies of people, connections, debts, and destinations.
_Netherland_ is definitely one of the best of the lot . . . much less self-conscious, in some respects, than previous offerings. The prose style is undoubtedly majestic, if borrowing more than a few cues from Fitzgerald in terms of vocabulary (and also means of death). Unquestionably, the incessant quest for the curious metaphor drives much of the writing style. WIthout exception, it's successful. Ornate observations, and twisty clauses of comparison and elegy for another New York, somewhere else, no longer anyone's to own. In particular, the 'Google Earth' sequence, in which the extremely symbolic cricket pitch is revisited virtually stands out as some extremely fine writing.
But let's put aside the brilliance of the writing for a moment, as hard as that is to do. What is being said; here? For the most part, the work is yet another extended meditation on the mythic redemption of 'New York': the metropolis as real, symbol, and imaginary. The psychoanalysis of extreme urbanity doesn't really reach any philosophical heights, just a languishing capitulation . . . like all the 9-11 novels, these are wealthy literary people . . . the very kind whose lungs weren't scarred that day . . . who stand idly buy in metonymic reproach for policies that they quietly endorse by their very lifestyles. Housing prices up in the Hamptons? Sobbing sirens as the American Express building shakes? I suspect this book, for all its beauty, will twenty years from now feel very dated and confined by the zeitgeist parameters of its time.
Where is O'Neill going with all this? I loved the way he led me by word and phrase, but the soul of the matter remains elusive. What he have instead if cricket, the under-appreciated sport that provides a technical gimmick (and quirky vocabulary) for injecting some culture into a rather prosaic tale of chasing love and clocks that won't turn back. Maybe you have to live in New York to feel part of O'Neil's ritualization of the landscape, but for me the work remained overly creedal in tone and perspective. Definitely not a Great Gatsby, despite the effort involved here.
Still, an exceptionally well-written book, the ends in a slush pile. Unlike Gatsby, faced down drowned in the froth of a payback death, we get the bloated corpse first. Rather than the grandeur of a West Egg swimming pool, our anti-hero snorts drainage water . . . the antithesis to Fitzgerald's vision is obvious.
 Disappointing June 14, 2008
19 out of 27 found this review helpful
I read somewhere (in one of many spectacular reviews) that Joseph O'Neill is incapable of writing a boring sentence. Unfortunately, he also seems incapable of writing a simple one. If long, flowery lines about cricket, waiting to play cricket, waiting in line at the DMV, and riding on the train interest you, then this is the book for you. I suppose there's some deep meaning here, but it's buried in self-consciously elaborate sentences and a whole lot of narcissism. The words "purple upchuck" (Truman Capote's description of Thomas Wolfe's writing) come to mind. A real disappointment.
A complex, fascinating story written in elegant, mellifluous prose May 20, 2008
17 out of 20 found this review helpful
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.
A European in New York City, Post 9-11 May 21, 2008
16 out of 21 found this review helpful
Mr. O'Neill has published a rambling account of one family's encounter with the attacks upon the World Trade Center and its impact upon the marrage of Rachel and Hans van de Broek. The writing is riveting and compelling as Hans is the first person narrator who tells his story in a stream of consciousness. For the reader looking for a linear story, this is not that novel. But it is also a novel about cricket (the sport), the men who play it, and Hans' friendship with Chuck Ramkissoon of Trinidad. This opens up the novel to be a tale of New York City surviving 9-11. This is one of the few times where a book is too short.
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