Netherland: A Novel by Joseph O'Neill
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Book Reviews of Netherland: A Novel
Book Review: FLYING DUTCHMAN
Summary: 5 Stars
We have to be careful with ethnic stereotypes these days, but perhaps it can be suggested without giving offence that the image of the Dutch bourgeoisie is one of rationality, level-headedness and emotions under control. Almost without exception in my experience, their command of English is perfect and they fit perfectly into careers in English-speaking nations. The narrator of Netherland is exactly such a Dutchman. In his career he is an effortless high-flyer, when separated from his wife and child he flies fortnightly to London from Niew Amsterdam to visit them without a financial qualm or any seeming sense of fatigue or jet-lag, he joins his family at a moment's notice and without any apparent change of pace in a holiday in Kerala, and his receptive imagination takes flight to Trinidad as well.
What is striking about Hans is that although a lot happens to him he is never the initiator of anything that happens. First his marriage falls apart, then by the end of the book it is getting together again, but his wife is the driver of both events. Intelligent, thoughtful and successful he may be, capable of a formidable amount of emotional resilience too, but tagging along like a tame dog in his wife's turbulent wake. Three extra-marital liaisons are mentioned, one in some detail. In this the woman seduces him, and when she then breaks off contact that's that and she is never even mentioned again. With the other two it seems to have been a similar story. Nothing of this nature is anywhere near as important to him as the game of cricket it seems. If anything in this superb novel strikes me as a little overdone it is the lengthy and loving musings on the great sport of the British Empire. It is only quite recently that I became aware that Holland and Ireland are making determined efforts to break into the imperial monopoly. Just how deep-rooted their love of the game is I am now beginning to understand from this tale put into the mouth of a Dutchman by an Irish author.
Cricket in America seems to be a game for either English émigrés (as in Waugh) or immigrants (as here). It is starting to follow soccer in being a big-money game, but the place where the money is to be made is clearly not the USA but India. Apart from the marriage/family theme, the other main narrative is of Hans's partial involvement, typically cautious, prompted and reactive on his part, with a cricket-minded immigrant entrepreneur who strongly recalls Gatsby, not least in the man's fate mentioned at the outset and partially explained near the end. I did not really find anything amounting to a theme with regard to 9/11 or the conflict in Iraq. They are mentioned because that is the timeframe in which the story is set and it would have been rather coy if they had not been referred to in a story largely taking place in New York, but the mentions are brief and incidental. It is true that Rachel cites the post-9/11 atmosphere as her reason for taking their son away from New York, but I fancy it's clear enough that if it had not been for that reason she would have found another.
This is the unfinished tale of a man whose emotions are genuine and deep - unfinished not (I hope) in the sense that there is going to be a sequel but because if anything is clear from the sequence of events here it is that neither Hans nor anyone else is likely to carry on from where the book leaves off in any placid nirvana. Hans's main characteristic is rationality. He is truthful with himself and can face up to his own shortcomings as he perceives them, but he is probably a bit too rational for his own good. If his life is going to be happy or fulfilled (whatever the latter might be in his case) that will only be so if others allow it to be. I found the whole novel to be one of the best and most involving that I have had the privilege of reading in years. I'm not myself inclined to read allegories or social/political messages into it. What this book possesses, for me, is human truth. The characterisation is exceptionally convincing, and it is helped by writing that I would describe as being of the highest quality. I do not normally have any great problem in putting novels down, but I certainly did with this one.
Book Review: A Story of New York's Immigrant Dreamers and Their Dreams
Summary: 5 Stars
Setting a novel in New York City after September 11, 2001 does not automatically make it a 9/11 novel, and Joseph O'Neill's NETHERLAND proves that point despite the nonsensical opening sentence of the book's dust jacket description, "In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11,..." To the contrary, the genius of O'Neill's story arises from its display of the precise opposite, that life in the great city for most resumed its normal struggling course within weeks if not days of the World Trade Center attacks. Indeed, one might well argue that NETHERLAND's message, intended or otherwise, is that the rest of the world has substantially over-inflated the impact of 9/11 on the local citizenry and their lives. Only those least attuned to the city, like Han's wife, carried the ill effects with them in the aftermath.
Hans van den Broek, an oil industry securities analyst, had moved to New York City in 1998 with his Londoner lawyer wife, Rachel; their son Jake was born in New York in 1999. Two months after the family was forced from their Tribeca home into temporary residence at the Chelsea Hotel by the post-9/11 clean-up, Rachel decides she can no longer tolerate her unresolved fears of another terrorist event. She announces her plan to return with Jake to London and, when Hans offers to leave as well, she tells him to stay. "This isn't a question of geography," she explains.
Left to his own devices, Hans is gradually drawn away from the glittering Wall Street banking world into that of the city's bedrock, its outer borough immigrant population. The driving force behind this discovery is a ceaselessly energetic Trinidadian businessman and cricket enthusiast named Chuck Ramkissoon. Chuck is one part dreamer and nine parts operator -- real estate entrepreneur, kosher sushi restaurant owner, weh-weh organizer (you'll have to read the book), and driving force behind the proposed creation of a professional cricket stadium in the area near Brooklyn's long-abandoned Floyd Bennett Field. While his residency at the Chelsea Hotel creates its own opportunities to meet such memorable characters as the angel-winged Turk, Mehmet Taspinar, it is his acquaintance with Chuck that opens Hans's eyes to "the other" New York City. Through Chuck, Hans comes to know Vinay (a Bangalorean newspaper critic of fast food shops), Eliza (Chuck's girlfriend whose profession involves custom-made personal photo albums), Mike Abelsky (Chuck's Moldavian Jewish business partner), and others. O'Neill's characters inhabit the spacious margins of New York City, the netherland seldom talked or written about that supplies the city with much of its energy and richness.
O'Neill's prose is filled with dead-on, occasionally hilarious descriptions of New York, whether it is the Department of Motor Vehicles office at Herald Square or a train ride up the eastern bank of the Hudson River past the Tappan Zee Bridge. His choice of Hans, a Dutchman, as his main character is an inspired one. The Dutch were the first European settlers of what was then New Amsterdam, and Dutch place names still abound in the city and surrounding area. Hans is both an immigrant and, in an historical sense, a returnee to the "new Netherlands" of his ancestors that some view as a never-never land and others characterize as an American netherworld.
The first few pages of the book, set in 2006, make clear that Hans and Rachel are together again in London and that Chuck's body has been found, handcuffed and dead, after floating in the Gowanus Canal for two years. Joseph O'Neill's NETHERLAND, like most true New York stories, is not about the destination but the journey and what one makes of life's opportunities after arriving. Despite Hans's ultimate return to his family in London, O'Neill makes clear that pre- or post-9/11, New York City is uniquely the world's true melting pot and never-never land. As an anonymous banker declares to Hans in the book's opening page, "New York's a very hard place to leave. And once you do leave..." His sentence ends, dangling and unfinished. No better words can be added.
Book Review: A Modern 'Great Gatsby' With Unforgettable Doomed Dreamer
Summary: 5 Stars
'Netherland' is a powerfully written novel that's deservedly being called the latest Great American Novel. The book's an introspective, slow-paced and mournful story of New York City that has the audacity to evoke both 9/11 and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'
The novel concerns Dutch-born financial analyst Hans van den Broek, an affluent denizen of New York's Chelsea Hotel who loses the joy and purpose in his life when his wife Rachel flees both the city and their marriage after the trauma of 9/11, taking their infant son with her. Hans tells his own story, but devotes considerable energy to being the captivated narrator of another man's story -- a fast-talking and grandiose Trinidadian immigrant named Chuck Ramkissoon, a friend whose larger-than-life plan for achieving success and respectability in America is as doomed as that of Jay Gatsby.
This is not a spoiler. Readers learn early on that Ramkissoon has been found tied up and murdered in the Gowanus Canal.
The novel spends a great deal of time on cricket, the only spark in Hans' dark existence after his wife leaves. Although I know nothing of the sport that I didn't pick up from this book, it doesn't detract from the impact of O'Neill's long and lyrical passages about the role of the game in Hans' life, its role in the lives of first-generation American immigrants like Ramkissoon, and the invisibility of the game to most citizens of the United States, where cricket serves as a stand-in for other exotic foreign subjects we might want to know better after 9/11 shrank the planet. I was amused by the notion, held deeply by the cricket players in the book, that the U.S. will not become truly civilized until it embraces cricket. "There's a limit to what Americans understand," one of Ramkissoon's potential investors tells Hans. "That limit is cricket." Ramkissoon's big dream is to build a cricket pitch on an abandoned airfield in Brooklyn, believing it will attract the world's best teams, worldwide TV audiences and the long-withheld affection of Americans.
O'Neill packs the novel's 256 pages with observations about New Yorkers that are worth repeating. Two of my favorites occur in rapid succession when the heartsick and unsociable Hans finally lures a woman home, providing a welcome respite from his morose internal dialogue:
"... while I changed, Danielle wandered around my apartment, as was her privilege: people in New York are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they're invited to step into. ...
"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."
In one conversation Ramkissoon uses a bit of Trinidadian slang that I really like. He derides one of his more obnoxious business associates as a pawmewan, a poor-me complainer who is always feeling sorry for himself. Hans is a huge pawmewan whose personal suffering occupies a majority of the book, but O'Neill describes the grieving and loss associated with failed marriage and parenthood with great skill.
I read that blogger Janice Harayda believes that Hans is an unreliable narrator, a prospect that adds considerable intrigue to Ramkissoon's murder. I don't know if I buy that, because O'Neill doggedly refuses to make Hans' life dramatic, devoting several pages at one point to an intolerably long day he wastes at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Although 'Netherland' is by no stretch a thriller, O'Neill manages in Chuck Ramkissoon to create an unforgettable American character -- like Jay Gatsby another dreamer dead in the water.
Book Review: A Happy Ending for the West
Summary: 5 Stars
There is a lot to recommend in Netherland: Joseph O'Neil's elegant and propulsive prose, a magnificent tour of New York past and present, and a peek into the world of cricket. As intoxicating as these pleasures are, it's the narrative they embellish that proves the richest and most provocative element of Netherland. Here's the story in a nutshell: three-member family in crisis + high-rolling Wall Street dad + 9/11 + walk on the wild-side = family denouement. Sound familiar? How about an eerie echo of Don DeLillo's Falling Man? DeLillo isn't the only American author O'Neil finds ways to contact: There is Mark Twain: the relationship of the two main characters Hans and C. Ramkissoon bears a striking resemblance to Huck Finn and Jim, even though Ramkissoon also bears a striking resemblance to Jay Gatsby. Then there's the special men's world of cricket resonating with Bernard Malamoud's The Natural. What makes the novel so special is Joseph O'Neil's ability to dig into a long-standing American theme like race or sports through a technique of slipstreamed multiple narratives that complicate and update the vitality of those narratives. There's noting easy in the updates either: no happy ending to Hans and C. Ramkissoon's relationship; the lost-and-found Eden of The Natural transformed into the civilizing outcome of brutal empire. In both the overall similarities and the cracks of difference, O'Neil provides a methodology to expand communication beyond the words on the page and suggest a space for the reader to do what readers do best: create meaning.
Nowhere is the density or the troubling position of O'Neil's metaphors so finely etched as in the brilliant final set-piece, which takes place at the London Eye. At first glance, the choice of setting signifies the engineering and architectural triumph of the "New London," but exploring just a bit will reveal the Eye as part of the Millenial year, a celebration of the upcoming third (Christian) millennium. Not to stop there, Hans tracks all the way back to Greece, noting the sunset as "Phoebus...up to his oldest and best tricks." I'm guessing you're starting to see the picture. Unlike the grim detente of a new social order that closes Falling Man, O'Neil provides for a completely plausible happy ending for his family. There is certainly no greater testimonial to the lasting mythos and continuing resilience of the West than this scene of familial re-unification across generations. Don't get me wrong. O'Neal isn't pandering to Hollywood here; he's sharing the complicated world of his desire and asking you to come clean, to make a decision about the meaning of his book. Either you buy into the very idea of a happy ending and find sustenance in the forces of history and the peculiarly Western idea of progress, or you don't and read Netherland as boosterism for a culture that has wandered into the dust bin of history without even knowing it. I'm still deciding. (That's a good thing.)
Book Review: A complex, fascinating story written in elegant, mellifluous prose
Summary: 5 Stars
Reading this novel gave me great pleasure. In contrast to its plain cover, this marvelous novel, written in mellifluous and elegant prose, is complex; its world sprawling and vast, with mind-boggling depth. After reading only two pages, I found myself charmed by its narrator's voice, and my mind glued to its world.
On the surface it is the story of its narrator, a banker named Hans van den Broek , born and raised in Netherlands, and working in London. While working in London in a bank, he meets an Englishwoman named Rachel and marries her. They have a son named Jake. In 1990's, they relocate to New York and live in TriBeCa. After the terrorist attack on the Word Trade Center on 9/11, however, they relocate again, and decide to live in the Chelsea Hotel. But Rachel's fear of another terrorist attack and the toxic political atmosphere in the United States create stress in their marriage, and the stress in turn compels Rachel to move with her son, once again, back to London.
Underneath this story, there is another story about a Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon. Ramkissoon is a shady character. He runs a fraudulent and illegal numbers racket. But like many men, even a man from the under-world, he has big ambitions and a dream of starting a world-class cricket field and cricket club in Staten Island and of turning cricket into a national sport in America.
The third story inter-woven with the other two is the story of the game cricket itself and its ardent players at the Staten Island Cricket Club, immigrants from countries such as Sri Lanka, Trinidad, Bahamas, and other tropical countries. Mr. O'Neill weaves the three strands into a lovely braid, his lyrical prose serving as an adornment, like a rope of fragrant jasmine that often adorns a braid in tropical lands.
The most striking feature of this novel, without a doubt, is Mr. O'Neill's elegant and flowing prose, smooth and free from jarring edges and ripples, and as lovely as the very best I have read in my fifty years of romance with the English language: "The day was thick as a jelly, with a hot, glassy atmosphere and no wind, not even a breeze from the Kill of Kull, which flows less than two hundred yards from Walker Park and separates Staten Island from New Jersey. Far away, in the south, was the mumbling of thunder. It was the kind of barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows cast by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe, yearn even for those days when you play cricket wearing two sweaters under a cold sky patched here and there by a blue tatter -- enough to make a sailor's pants, as my mother used to say."
Mr. O'Neill's command over the English language is such that his long sentences have the miraculous property of never annoying the reader. In fact, they tickle the reader's mind and induce great pleasure.