Netherland

Netherland
Author: Joseph O’Neill 2008 256 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started July 2 2008, Finished July 4 2008


This book, belonging to that new genre, the post 9/11 NYC novel and subject of (too) much critical praise, often comparing it to Gatsby, has much to recommend it including state of the art prose that as with Updike and Roth, occasionally causes me to marvel “now that’s writing”, a couple of intriguing mysteries that keep one turning the pages, a refreshingly outer-boroughs centric point of view, a novel to the American reader central cricket-as-new-world-life-metaphor, an almost unequaled differentiation among voices – contrary to most novels, each character speaks in a unique and credible voice -- and a bravura stream of consciousness time changing in the narration of a long chapter near the end when the narrator’s thoughts range seamlessly across almost his entire life with each shift unapparent until well after it has occurred. However, Netherland falls short of greatness for me because the mysteries are not satisfactorily resolved and its central characters never really resonated. The novel hinges on the trans-Atlantic separation of the narrator, a successful early 30’s Dutch expatriate financial analyst, and his wife Rachel, an English lawyer who for nebulous reasons loses faith in Hans and their life in New York, prompting her return to her native country. The separation plunges Hans into isolation and despondency which ultimately lead to his immersion in the sub world of New York area cricket leagues comprised primarily of barely legal third world immigrants and through which he meets Chuck Ramskoonian, a Trinidadian expat, dreamer, schemer and bootstrapper who is the book’s Gatsby analogue. Chuck is an intriguing character, but not enough to build a book around. The nostalgic grounding Hans finds in cricket is more described than felt causes the book’s center to never fully cohere. However, the biggest problem for me was the inability of Hans and Rachel to communicate about their marriage. Hans clearly resents the separation and throughout the book longs for a resumption of the relationship, but is maddeningly passive, letting the barely communicative Rachel dictate their course. I find it very hard to believe that such a UMC couple would not have talked the issue to death or that at the least, Hans would have repeatedly demanded an explanation and a prognosis from the confused and tongue-tied Rachel; Hans’ simmering deferral to his wife, which extends over years, rendered him implausible to me; Rachel’s disinclination to explain her actions had a similar effect and my consequent lack of identification with and belief in the central characters significantly diminished the book for me.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“You know what my motto is?”
“I didn’t think people had mottoes anymore.” (80)

“Like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing.” (109)

[London] “… I’ve speculated, to the bizarrely premature crystallization of lives here, where men and women past the age of forty, in some cases even the age of thirty, may easily be regarded as over the hill and entitled to an essentially retrospective idea of themselves; whereas in New York selfhood’s hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks: that you might have no climbing boots to hand was beside the point.” (178-9)

… “ she reaches for my hand and squeezes it. Strange, how such a moment grows in value over a marriage’s course. We gratefully pocket each of them, these sidewalk pennies, and run with them to the bank as if creditors were banging on the door.” (183)

“As he stared up at millions of stars, he was filled with a dread he had never known before.
… I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.” (200)

“ … all people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket.” (211)