Netherland: A Novel by Joseph O'Neill
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Book Reviews of Netherland: A Novel
Book Review: The Limit is Cricket
Summary: 5 Stars
1t's 2006 and six-foot-five equity analyst Hans van den Broek and his barrister wife Rachel are back together in London with their son Jake after a separation, when Hans gets a phone call from the New York Times. The reporter on the other end of the phone tells him Khamraj Ramikisson has been found dead in the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. He'd been murdered. He had been handcuffed, his body had been rotting in filth and stink for two years.
From there Hans goes on to remember his life in New York following the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. He and his family had been forced to move from their home to the famous Chelsea Hotel, but only a month later Rachel takes Jake back to London, she's unhappy with both the American government and her husband.
Hans stays behind, living life and observing people in the Chelsea in sort of a stupor, then one day he sees a cricket bat in a taxi and is taken back to the sport of his youth in Holland. He joins a Staten Island team.
One day an angry bowler starts throwing at Hans' head and the umpire tosses the bowler out of the game, then stands up to a fan with a gun who disagrees with his decision. The ump is a Trinidadian, two decades older than Hans named Khamraj Ramikisson, who goes by the name of Chuck.
Chuck is a hustler, a schemer, a man perpetually seeking that greener grass. He has big plans and one of his biggest is a cricket stadium in Floyd Bennett Field, an abandoned airport in Brooklyn. He wants to make cricket a huge game in America and he wants to get rich in the process. Chuck's motto is, "Think Fantastic" and that just about sums up the man.
Hans becomes infected and with Chuck, infatuated with the eternally optimistic man who believes, despite Nine-Eleven and it's aftermath, despite it all, that America is still a land of opportunity and endless possibilities. However, sadly for Chuck, he doesn't quite get it that there are those in the country he loves who won't understand or appreciate his dreams, who won't share his optimism, those who think like one potential investor tells him about his grand scheme, that, "there's a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket".
We know right from the start how it all ends up for Chuck Ramikisson, but we read on anyway, because the writing is so fluid, the characters so real and I can certainly attest to how real as life Chuck Ramikisson is. I spent half a decade living in Trinidad and loving every minute of it and while there I met more than a few folks like him, wonderful people all and this is a wonderful book, a story superbly told about people you won't soon forget.
Reviewed by Vesta Irene
Book Review: So we beat on, readers against the current.
Summary: 5 Stars
My thoughts on Netherland relate to the final page of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which seems to be the precedent of O'Neils novel.
(loose qoutation)
'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past... Until gradually I bacame aware of the old island that flowered for Dutch Sailors' eyes.'
What 'Netherland' boils down to for American readers (New Yorkers in particular), is how willing are we to receive our cultural history from foreign perspectives. For all of those whom made statements post 9/11 like: 'it's our chickens coming home to roost...on', I think we finally can say itabout our literary experience.
In the 20th century, the American Literary greats like Mark Twain, Henry James, Hemmingway, the list goes on... found success in focusing on foreign territoeies. The ugly, or not so ugly American raging through continental Europe served as a means for codifying a comparately vague national identity, defining ourselves as readers and writers from experiences while abroad.
And isn't it literary justice that one of the most overtly 9/11 novels to date levels at New Yorkers through foreign eyes. Year by year, our self-image as the dominant economic, political and artistic voice recedes before us, and never has the idea felt so prescient as when I read 'Netherland'.
While I was willing to concede that 'Netherland' was evocative in how it referenced America from the 'Netherland', its characters grounded in the outerboroughs of NYC- looking distantly at disaster stricken Manhattan Island, the novel was equally dissapointing in how superficially it rendering the landscape.
But what could I possibly have expected? If I once thought Hemmingway an expert on Bull Riding in Spain and Big Game hunting in Africa, maybe the unsatisfied feeling that I had while reading about my hometown during the time that I came of age is a wakeup call... a reason to become more humble, to understand that having an American Passport does not make myself an expert of the world, equally an American Visa is still not yet American as Apple Pie.
I believe and hope that literature continues to be an avenue for deep cultural exchange, and I think foreign writers will continue to sharpen O'Neils "Netherland"... It is a view we should all be willing to consider.
Book Review: Calamitous events often cause us to reassess our lives
Summary: 5 Stars
Netherland could have easily been written after any major catastrope. The point of the book is that after a horrific event such as 9/11, people are often moved to reevaluate their lives in the context of what is important and what is trivial. This reassessment if often colored by ones background and upbringing and can highlight incompatibilities between husbands and wives. Hans is a tall, quiet, intelligent, upwardly mobile Dutchman, married to Rachel, an Englishwomen and a high powered, eloquent lawyer. Rachel is a "doer". She is emotional and very vocal about her feelings. She is, for Hans, a "human flashlight" whereas Hans "naturally associates loves with a house fallen into silence" - a result of his Dutch upbringing in a single parent home.
In the midst of this tension between Rachel and Hans is Chuck Ramkisoon, a Trinidadian and a naturalized American citizen who is essentially Hans' only (and unlikely) friend in New York - essentially Hans' lifeline after Rachel leaves Hans and moves back to London after 9/11. Chuck is easily the most interesting character in the book. He is typical of the immigrant who comes to the U.S. in search of the American Dream - an intelligent, self taught man who questions Hans about his business in the same way as a professional fund manager. He umpires cricket games, has a kosher sushi restaurant with a Jewish partner and runs a wei wei ring -illegal gambling. He's a petty crook with big dreams and big ideas about starting a cricket club in new York that will solve the world's ills. He has a wife and a mistress. He has businesses both legal and illegal. He's a messy guy with a messy life but as his partner says, he has enough life in him for ten people.
Without giving away the entire story, I believe the author's point is that while we are all, of course, a product of our environment and upbringing, the one thing we ultimately all seek is love and human connections.
One word of caution for people who have read the "one star" comments. Yes, there are come sentances that may come off as convoluted. That said, these are few and far between. Overall, this is a well written book that deserves it's cricital acclaim.
Book Review: Best novel I have read in manyyears
Summary: 5 Stars
I loved this book. I lack the patience to read many novels but the greatness of the writing in this book overwhelmed my frustration with fiction, much of which is either too simplistic or too self-conscious.
I didn't see this book, as others have, as a "9/11 in NYC" book. Not even close. It can be read on one level as simply the narrative of a man's thoughts about two important relationships in his life and no more, and in that basic frame, it is gorgeously written, and soars at the end (which to me contrasted favorably with Oscar Wao, the one other excellent novel I read this year, which felt anticlimatic at the end, as if the author had to force an ending because the book had reached a certain point where there was nowhere better to go). In this context, New York City is just a place where most of it happens and the 9/11 references are almost obligatory and the book would have seemed strained had it not made some.
Then, of course there is the level at which it is a meditation on the idea of America in a post-9/11 world and the ironic retelling of the Gatsby story in the form of a hustler from Trinidad, and the analogue between the reconciliation between spouses with different attitudes toward the US and the need for America to reconcile with its best self were imaginative and deeply satisfying approaches to the question of the American identity in the 21st century. In this frame, the 9/11 references are of course there but the issues raised are not "9/11 in NYC" issues as much as they are "Iraq" and "Bush / Cheney Scalia destroying civil liberties" issues which are broad American issues put in play by what happened on 9/11. Such that "9/11" is more like the plot developments in a Chekhov play, or the Macguffin in a Hitchcock movie, than the focal point of the book.
I thought the other reviews of this book were extraordinarily incisive and far better than what one usually sees in this website. I think that in itself testifies implicitly to the excellence of the book. As to whether this book will stand the test of time, who knows, but it is the best novel I have read in several years.
Book Review: An extraordinary achievement
Summary: 5 Stars
O'Neill's novel is just marvelous. A poignant, funny and heart-wrenching account of events that unfold as a result of the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center. The fear, vulnerability and the sense of isolation that the attack exposes are palpable in passages of beautifully written prose. I found myself constantly pausing after paragraphs to reread and savor the author's descriptions.
The New York he describes is as authentic as any I have encountered in a novel: dreaded trips to the DMV are as dreadful as can be--creepy "performance artists" at the Time Square subway station are even more oppressive than the suffocating maze undergoing renovation. These "netherlands" and New York's Hudson Valley the original New Netherlands are juxtaposed to the mile high skyscrapers and Tribeca lofts that domicile the newest colonists.
Under the observant eye of Hans, a commodties analyst from the original Netherlands and his unlikely but entirely believable Trinidadian companion, Chuck, O'Neill explores the terrifying possibility of being alone in a city of eight million people. Loosely structured around their relationship to the game of cricket, Hans sets out to find something that will re-anchor and replace the sense of permanence he has lost.
I will never again hear the upstate town of Poughkeepsie pronounced without recalling the author's description as merry childish blurting. I probably will never go on Google Earth without experiencing something of the futility Hans feels as he "travels" to England each night to try to be near to the son who has gone home with Hans's wife. The technology, like his emotions will only let him get so close to family he aches for.
The entire book is what fiction does best: it is new and familiar at the same time. These characters are strangers and different yet just the same as yourself. Some reviewers have made a comparison Fitzgeralds's Gatsby which is apt. But for me, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland conjured up EM Forster's admonition in Howard's End: "Just connect....connect!".