"Netherland"
by Joseph O'Neill
Pantheon, 256 pp., $23.95
BOOK REVIEW |
In the novel "Netherland," Joseph O'Neill composes a hymn to post-Sept. 11 New York as a city that has always dealt in trauma and displacement while offering the analgesic of a million variations on the American dream.
The terrorist attacks drive Hans van den Broek, a Dutch-born oil-stock analyst, from his flat near Ground Zero, bust up his marriage and force him to find distraction in cricket and the schemes of a Trinidadian transplant named Chuck Ramkissoon.
Hans, who came to the U.S. in 1998 at age 30 by way of The Hague and London, narrates the two years he spent in New York after his British wife and their infant son fled back to the U.K. in late 2001. By accident, he discovers the city's active cricket scene and soon devotes to the sport of his youth the weekends he doesn't spend overseas with his family.
Chuck, a match umpire in his 50s, impresses Hans with an impromptu speech on what is and isn't cricket. The expatriate is soon drawn into the immigrant's hustling life — his kosher sushi restaurant, gambling racket, real-estate ventures and a plan to convert an abandoned Brooklyn airstrip into a cricket ground.
The story is told as Hans looks back from 2006, when he is reunited with his family, his memories spurred by learning that Chuck was murdered two years earlier. Knowing their fates by Page 3 doesn't spoil anything. O'Neill teases out the strange relationship of his two main characters as he jumps around in time, keeping suspense and pace perking along in a tale with scant real action.
O'Neill was born in Ireland, raised in Holland and worked as a barrister in London before moving to New York, where he has been a regular book reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly. He has written two previous novels and a study of his grandfathers' divergent politics. Even with the constraints of a first-person narrator in "Netherland," his prose is well-crafted and thoughtful without feeling forced, though occasionally Hans succumbs to homely images and tiresome bouts of self-pity.
It is of the city O'Neill sings most beautifully. Greenhorns and old boulevardiers alike will find themselves charmed. He rediscovers chestnuts like the casual sadism of the Department of Motor Vehicles, the colorful seediness of the Chelsea Hotel, the visual blare of Times Square, the crazed mammoth balloons of Thanksgiving Day. He unearths fresher treasures as well. O'Neill's take on the man who dances with a life-size mannequin in the subway snapped me back to the first time I saw them.
The book closes with Hans and family aboard London's giant Ferris wheel at day's end in 2006, where he recalls a ferry ride back to lower Manhattan before Sept. 11 and the way the setting sun made "a brilliant yellow mess" on the World Trade Center:
"It was possible to imagine that vertical accumulations of humanity were gathering to greet our arrival. The day was darkening at the margins, but so what? A world was lighting up before us ... a world concentrated most glamorously of all, it goes almost without saying, in the lilac acres of two amazingly high towers."
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