Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
When I was in New York in May, reviews of this novel were all over the New York Times and the New Yorker: it was clearly the book of that moment. And when Martha Kearney revealed not long after on Newsnight Review that she was reading it, I realised it had gone transatlantic. It seems that this story of the migrant experience in New York and of cricket - cricket - has broad appeal. In publishing terms, at least as far a literary fiction is concerned, Netherland is a triumph. In terms of pure literary achievement? A fairly interesting draw.
The story takes place between 1998, when the narrator Hans van den Broek first moves from London, where he works as an analyst for a merchant bank, to New York, and his return about five years later, and it's a slightly unusual story in that the main action - the determining action, the development that drives van den Broek back across the Atlantic - is kept in the background, subsidiary to the important foreground events we care more about. After the attack on September 11 2001 van den Broek's English wife Rachel decides she can no longer live in New York - she needs a feeling of existential security for their son Jake - and can no longer live, either, with Hans. She moves to England; and the plot resolves when some years later she accepts Hans back into her life and the family is reunited in London.
It's what happens in the interim that is the real interest of this novel. Hans used to play cricket as a young man - we are treated to plenty of his childhood reminiscences of cricket, cycling, his mother and her lover in the Hague - and while alone in New York he decides to pad up once more and play for a club on Staten Island. It's a wild kind of cricket, played in long grass so that lofted strokes, to Hans's purist distaste, are essential, played by a mixture of immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, from Jamaica, St. Kitts and Trinidad, a cricket in which strange things happen.
The man stopped ten feet from Chuck. He held the gun limply. He looked at me, then back at Chuck. He was speechless and sweating. He was trying, as Chuck would afterward relate, to understand the logic of his situation.
The three of us stood there for what seemed a long time. A container ship silently went through the back gardens of the houses on Delafield Place.
Chuck took a step forward. "Leave the field of play, sir," he said firmly. He extended his palm toward the clubhouse, an usher's gesture. "Leave immediately please. You are interfering with play. Captain," Chuck said loudly, turning to the Kittitian captain, who was a little distance away, "please escort this gentleman from the field."
This is the first appearance in the novel of Chuck Ramkissoon, an excellent creation who carries this novel. As a Trinidadian, Ramkissoon is fond of relating wisdoms from his Caribbean childhood, and as a new New Yorker on the make, he is fond of mixing in all types of business from the marginally dodgy to, as we later discover, the definitely dangerous. But he's also a man with a dream, an American dream to bring the joy of cricket to that country, or rather back to America, because Chuck argues that the game was popular in America's infancy and has unaccountably fallen out of favour to the "aerial game" of baseball. He's a man of big plans and big visions, who wants to build a cricket stadium on an old airstrip in Brooklyn and transform America through the great old colonial game - the global game.
"I'm saying that people, all people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they're playing cricket. What's the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle. I really believe this. Everybody who plays the game benefits from it. So I say, why not Americans?" He was almost grim with conviction. In a confidential tone, he said, "Americans cannot really see the world. They think they can, but they can't. I don't need to tell you that. Look at the problems we're having. It's a mess, and it's going to get worse. I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. With the New York Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in U.S. history. Why not? Why not say so if it's true? Why hold back? I'm going to pen our eyes. And that's what I have to tell the Park Service"
It's a crazy scheme, of course, from a crazy character, but the scheme and the man are worth four fifths of whatever you pay for this book. Perhaps one of the best novelists - I'm thinking of William Boyd, perhaps because of the global sweep of Netherland as well as its comic element - might have made more of Ramkissoon, made him a deeper character, allowed him to change or at least perhaps fail. Even so, Joseph O'Neill can be pleased with having invented him.
Otherwise, the novel is well constructed and stylishly enough written - very much with an American audience in mind, although the author is Irish, and worked as a barrister in England. But in some ways it's disappointingly bland. The story of the marriage for example, of Rachel's inexplicable (seen through husband's eyes) withdrawal and strange return - it's all quite English, quite middle class, quite male and quite dull, ultimately. I found Rachel quite an empty character, her personality conveyed only by the fact that she's a lawyer who supposedly talks and thinks in predictably lawyerish ways. And once you start to consider the emptiness of one character, it occurs to you that there are other vaccuums here, too. Hans himself is empty: we only know him through the way cricket, New York and Chuck project on to him. He brings nothing to the novel, really. And there are other ways in which the novel is at times uninspired. There are many unnecessary recollections from childhood from both Hans and Chuck, none of which I thought generated heat or light. I often found developments overdetermined, overexplained by Hans, as though the author feared the credibility of his action and needed to inoculate the reader against disbelief by pointing to clear chains of causation. And I tired very, very quickly of the occasional cameo characters - particularly "the angel" - who are clearly meant to give an impression of the wackiness of New York life but who made me feel as though I were reading an earnest effort from an American short-story magazine.
Not a great novel, then; on this evidence I wont be looking forward to O'Neill's next work anything like as keenly as I will Edward Docx's. But the odd one does lift: the character of Chuck is what makes the book worth buying. In paperback, I'd suggest.
Christopher Tayler in the Guardian agreed with me about Hans and Chuck as well as the "denizens of Chelsea" and the novel's occasional feeling of contrivance, and Stephen Amidon in the Sunday Times agreed with me about Hans and Rachel's garden-variety marital malaise. The Economist was unimpressed, and I think Benjamin Kunkel in the LRB is right that the novel is emarrassed by money. One of the annoying things about it (overdetermined and explained away, possibly, by parallels with The Great Gatsby) is the way money is nothing at all to be worried about. I'm always a bit critical of novels and films in which the characters are freed from the scarcity that rules most people's lives.
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