Netherland

Book five in The New York Times Best Ten Books of 2008 is Netherland, a novel by the Irish-born, Holland-raised, and current U.S. resident Joseph O'Neill. The diverse geography of his background is important to note because his narrator is a Dutch man who lives much of his adult life in London, but most of the events of this book concern his stay of a few years in New York City.

James Wood, writing in The New Yorker, calls this a "post-colonial Great Gatsby," and I'd have to agree. He also warns against terming this book a 9/11 novel, and again I agree. Any book about America during the year 2001 and immediately after will be hard-pressed not to touch on the subject, much as any book about the 1930's deals with the Great Depression and the 1940's with World War II. But it doesn't mean the book is fundamentally about those topics. So it is with Netherland, which begins with Hans, an analyst of oil and gas stocks, who grew up in The Hague, went to England where he met his wife, Rachel, and then moved to take a job in New York. The couple and their baby son live in a loft near the World Trade Center, and after the attacks move into a room in the legendary Hotel Chelsea. Soon, though, Rachel returns to England with her son out of fear, and Hans is left to wander the city.

By serendipity, he finds himself drawn to the game of his childhood, cricket. He joins a team that plays in a softball field on Staten Island, and gets to know an umpire, with the vivid name of Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidanian. An unlikely friendship forms, and soon Hans is drawn into Chuck's far-flung world. He is an entrepreneur, a numbers-runner, an autodidact, and likely a gangster, but Hans is fascinated, especially with Chuck's dream of opening a full-scale New York cricket club, hoping it will catch on and become a popular American sport.

This is a lovely book, and my god can O'Neill write. His sentences are masterful constructions, with some eye-catching passages: "He stood by the window looking out at the dripping sleet, a little guy in a clean white shirt. His skinny, hairy hands were in the pockets of his pants, gripping and gripping something. Not knowing what to say, I got up and stood next to him, and for a while we surveyed, twenty-two floors down, the roving black blooms of four-dollar umbrellas."

Or consider this passage, when Hans attends a road-safety class (his visit to the DMV is described as a harrowing bureaucratic nightmare): "Our lecturer, a destroyed-looking man in his sixties, appeared apologetically before us, and I am certain that a compassionate understanding tacitly arose among the students that we should do everything to assist this individual, an agreeable and no doubt clever man whose life had plainly come to some kind of ruin." If I had written this sentence I would celebrate for a day or two.

Mostly this is a book about New York City, truly capturing how it is a mosaic of neighborhoods and ethnic groups, each one containing a world that the rest of the city knows nothing about (it's frequently said that New York is not among the top tier of sports towns in the U.S. because no matter how big the game, there are millions of people who don't care about the outcome). I like this sequence best: "I became familiar with the topical sights: the chiming, ceaselessly peregrinating ice-cream truck, driven by a Turk; the Muslim funeral home on Albemarle Road out of which watchful African American men spilled in sunglasses and black suits; the Hispanic gardeners working on the malls; the firehouse on Cortelyu that slowly gorged on reversing fire trucks; the devout Jewish boulevardiers on Ocean Parkway; the sticks of light that collected in the trees as though part of the general increase. Lush Flatbush..."

I also admired O'Neill's restraint. Imagine a novelist with a character living in the Hotel Chelsea without mention of Sid Vicious or Nancy Spungen--well done. I also must congratulate him on writing a novel that features cricket prominently, yet I, who know nothing about the game (other than bats and balls are involved) wasn't slowed down in the least. I imagine it would be like a European reading Bernard Malamud's The Natural.

My only quibble with the book is O'Neill doesn't keep good control of time. The story is narrated in non-linear fashion, with flashbacks within flashbacks. Frequently I lost my sense of when things were happening, even though he occasionally stated the month and year. At one time an error slipped by he and his editor, as he tells us that his mother dies in May, yet when he goes to Holland for the funeral he talks about walking around in a cold April.

But that's small potatoes. This is a terrific novel what it means to be an immigrant in America, as well as how to handle the loss of love, and even perhaps recapture it.