Summary
Netherland is Joseph O'Neill's third novel, published by Pantheon in May 2008. Its narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a Dutch financial analyst living in New York with his English wife, Rachel, a lawyer, and their young son, Jake. After the September 11 attacks the family decamps to the Hotel Chelsea, the marriage frays, and Rachel takes Jake home to London. Hans stays behind alone, and to fill the weekends he starts playing cricket on Staten Island, in a league whose players come mostly from the West Indies and South Asia.
There he meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian umpire, businessman and dreamer who wants to build a proper cricket stadium in Brooklyn and who runs a numbers game on the side while working for a Russian gangster. Chuck is charming, patriotic about his adopted country and not entirely honest, and the friendship between the two men is the heart of the book. Hans tells the story from later, back in London, and he knows how it ends before he starts: years after the two lost touch, Chuck's body is found in the Gowanus Canal, handcuffed. The novel never settles who killed him, though it points strongly to his business dealings. On one of his visits to London, Hans learns that Rachel has been having an affair with a chef named Martin; in time he moves back to London himself, and the marriage survives. The book closes with the three of them together on the London Eye, while Hans remembers seeing Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry.
This is a reflective novel rather than a plotted one. Hans drifts between years and memories, and O'Neill's sentences are long, exact and sometimes very funny. Kirkus called it "not easy to read, but it's even harder to stop thinking about," and Zadie Smith, who wrote about it at length in The New York Review of Books, remarked that "It's a novel that wants you to know that it knows you know it knows." Readers who do not know cricket need not worry; the game is explained through Chuck's belief in it. The book suits anyone interested in New York after the attacks and in the lives of immigrants who never quite count as Americans.
Historical Context & Significance
Netherland won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2009. "No better mind has gone to work on where we are post-9/11," said Lee Abbott, one of the three judges, who admitted he had never watched a cricket match: "I'd love to see one in O'Neill's company." The finalists included Susan Choi's A Person of Interest, Richard Price's Lush Life and Ron Rash's Serena. In The New York Times Book Review Dwight Garner called it "the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell," and the paper named it one of the ten best books of 2008.
The novel was longlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize, won the 2009 Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the 2010 International Dublin Literary Award. In the spring of 2009 President Barack Obama told The New York Times Magazine he had tired of briefing books and was reading Netherland in the evenings. O'Neill, born in Cork and raised in the Netherlands, found New York's cricket clubs himself after moving there in 1998.
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