Netherland: A Novel by Joseph O'Neill
|
List Price: Our Price: $3.48 You Save: $20.47 (85%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Netherland: A Novel
Book Review: A heavy but charming examination of exile, friendship, and New York City
Summary: 4 Stars
Hans van den Broek is a man adrift. Recently separated from his wife Rachel, who has returned to her native England with the couple's young son, Hans is in his mid-30s and still living out of a suitcase in the Chelsea Hotel in 2003, a temporary situation that seems to have become permanent after Hans and Rachel fled their Tribeca loft in the wake of September 11, 2001.
Left behind by his family in a city that is not his home, Hans, a native Dutchman who has grown fabulously wealthy as an oil futures analyst in Manhattan, is still flummoxed by his quasi-adopted country and its inhabitants. And even as he attempts to make sense of everything from turns of phrase to the particularly aggressive style of the American walk signal at traffic lights, Hans tries to make sense of himself.
An analyst by trade, Hans is also an analyst by nature, noticing small details in the people and places he encounters, and devoting not insignificant efforts on analyzing himself, particularly the remoteness he feels not only from his family but also from his youthful self, one who had meaningful relationships, found joy in life and excelled at the sport of cricket.
So when Hans connects with an energetic, charismatic Trinidadian immigrant named Chuck Ramkissoon, his subsequent discoveries reconnect Hans not only with a little-known subculture of New York but also to his youthful past. Through Chuck, and with his involvement in the New York Cricket Club, Hans encounters immigrants from virtually every English-speaking country in the world as they meet for games on makeshift cricket fields carved out of every spare corner of the five boroughs and beyond. Hans's reunion with his beloved sport brings him back to his past, to his origins and possibly to himself.
NETHERLAND is Joseph O'Neill's third novel. A native of Ireland who has lived in the Netherlands for many years, O'Neill certainly understands the feeling of estrangement from one's own country as well as the feeling of being an alien in one's adopted homeland. The symbolism of exile is apparent throughout this elegiac, thoughtfully-paced novel --- not only in the shape of cricket but also in images of migratory birds, shifting ice floes, and the constantly moving and shifting population of New York City.
The city itself is practically a character in the novel, described alternately by Hans, the narrator, with grudging admiration, genuine fondness and a sense of loss as he prepares to leave the city forever. As the city moves through the seasons during the winter and spring of 2003 and beyond, the narrative alights on tiny moments --- a degrading incident at the DMV, a surprise sprout from a long-forgotten flower bulb, the reawakening of the city's homeless population --- that not only point to a profoundly observant understanding of the city but also mirror Hans's shifting consciousness.
Although NETHERLAND, with its meticulous details, heavy self-reflection and at times ponderous pace, may not be a novel for everyone, it will speak strongly to those who value carefully crafted sentences, wise observations and moments of startling insight.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
Book Review: Hans and Rachel
Summary: 4 Stars
Rachel, a lawyer, is unhappy in her marriage with Hans, an analyst at an investment bank. And so, the couple separates, with Rachel returning to London with Jake, their young son. While Hans visits his wife and son twice monthly, he spends most of his time alone in New York. He is depressed. He has no real friends.
In this life of isolation, Hans makes a serendipitous connection to the cricket community in New York, where he meets Chuck R., a naturalized citizen from the Caribbean. In this shabby new world of immigrant cricketers, Hans slowly develops a sense of community, where his new peers are the Pakistani guy who works at a gas station or the Hindu who drives a cab. Meanwhile, Chuck presents to Hans an image of entrepreneurial striving, which has qualities that are both inspiring and sleazy. Slowly, the world that grows from this cricket connection begins to exert its power on Hans. Then, he has a moment-of-truth and decides to return to London, resolving to win back his family.
In telling this story, O'Neill offers patches of writing that are wonderfully poetic. Perhaps, the best examples were presented in THE NEW YORKER review of NETHERLAND, which was written by the overpraising James Wood (How Fiction Works). At the same time, O'Neill is far from a flawless writer. He can, for example, be melodramatic:
"A hooting sob rose up from my chest. I began to gulp and pant. A deep and useless shame filled me--shame that I had failed my wife and son, shame that I lacked the means to fight on, to tell her that I refused to accept that our marriage had suddenly collapsed..."
And his prose occasionally verges on clunky.
"Rain spotted my window as we pulled away into the tunnels and gorges through which the Penn Station trains secretively dribble up the West Side."
Readers that find the greatest pleasure in NETHERLAND will be those interested in the marriage of Hans and Rachel. Those looking for a book about 9/11 will be disappointed, since the problems in this marriage preceded 9/11 and evolved without real connection to this horrible event. This, in fact, is something that O'Neill himself wryly acknowledges, with Hans identifying early in this novel the level where NETHERLAND truly operates. "All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women's magazines."
One final point: There are minor mistakes in this book that drove me crazy. Hans, for example, wouldn't work in a cubicle. (He's the fourth rated analyst in his specialty, according to INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS. This means his recommendations bring in big bucks and he gets an office.) Hans and Rachel taxi to Riverdale from the West Side using Broadway? Nope, they'd use the Henry Hudson. An investment banker and lawyer move into the Chelsea Hotel with their wee child after 9/11? NO WAY! (Go to Wikipedia and you'll see what I mean. This is not the place Yuppies go to recover from trauma.) And in Central Park, you'll never find Sheep's Meadow. But the Sheep Meadow is near Tavern on the Green.
Book Review: Intoxicating
Summary: 4 Stars
"The Adversity of Hans van den Broek, as such a tale might be called, amounts to not very much." Thus the narrator of this unusually acute and well-written novel describes his own misery during a two-year stay in NYC. The misery was triggered indirectly by 9/11 and directly by the departure of van den Broek's acerbic wife and little son Jake. The marriage at the heart of this tale is hardly charged with warmth. In fact, both Hans and Rachel, his wife, are cool customers, fancying themselves as intellectuals and superior beings. Hans, however, is brought down to earth in a hurry, and winds up in residence at the Chelsea Hotel, under whose roof a collection of eccentrics resides that provide him with odd yet comforting company. These characters are well described and are fascinating.
The true heart of this work, however, beats in Chuck Ramkissoon, the Trinidadian cricket maven, raconteur, shady character, womanizer, gangster, and roving genius with whom Hans takes up during his forced hiatus. Chuck's dream is to bring cricket center stage in America and to bankroll a major stadium for the sport at Floyd Bennet Field in Brooklyn. At the very outset of this novel, we know that Chuck's body has been found in the Gowanus Canal, hands cuffed behind his back. Yet this information does not detract one bit from the tale, and in fact, brings out Chuck's life even more.
The narrative is hypnotic in parts because of Chuck's long and fascinating rants, and the book is hard to put down. I was repulsed at times, however, by Hans's sometimes blatant narcissism and self-absorption. In fact, van den Broek's personal melodrama "amounts to not very much," but it's couched within a fresh eye's view of my city, New York, and all its familiar places, including the outer boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island.
I recommend this work, but O'Neill puts his vocabulary on display a number of times, which might send you off to the dictionary if you are a conscientious reader. One might say this is a bit of overwriting, but this is a minor quibble with a very good piece of work.
Book Review: Lyrical and flexible prose captures relationships and sports
Summary: 4 Stars
Netherland is the story of a couple (Hans and Rachel) living in New York City with their young son. After the September 11th terrorist attacks, Rachel moves back to England where she's from with their son, claiming she can't raise a child in such a "diseased" country. After being left behind in NYC by his family, Hans immerses himself in the city's cricket subculture and befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian entrepreneur who dabbles in shady enterprises and referees cricket matches on the side.
O'Neill's lyrical and flexible prose captures the nuanced complexity of intimate relationships with as much success as it describes the various strokes available to a batter in a cricket game ("the glance, the hook, the cut, the sweep, the cover drive, the pull and all those other offspring of technique conceived to send the cricket ball rolling and rolling, as if by magic, to the far-off edge of the playing field"). O'Neill's prose is the best part of this book.
The vivid character of Ramkissoon is the second best part of this book. Ramkissoon dreams of building a world-class cricket arena in Brooklyn and thinks cricket has the power to save the world. Despite his sentimental ideas, or maybe because of them, Ramkissoon is wholly authentic and believable. The character of Rachel, however, is not quite so well conceived. Although O'Neill accurately describes the unsettled feeling felt by many New Yorkers after September 11th, Rachel's abandonment of her marriage and escape back to England feels more like a plot device than a credible response.
This slim novel tackles many big themes, including marriage (its failure and its resurrection), happiness, September 11th and its aftereffects, sports (literally and as an analogy for human fellowship), and friendship. There's even an unsolved murder mystery. This unique and sensitive melding of stories offers something for everyone, but the book occasionally attempts too much. Certain underdeveloped threads and loose ends cause Netherland to fall short of a masterpiece.
Book Review: A document of our time
Summary: 4 Stars
When this book was published in the spring of 2008, it received wonderful reviews, most notably in May on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Book Review Magazine. The usually difficult and persnickety Michiko Kakutani also gave it high marks in another review in the Times' daily edition. It was therefore a surprise when the book was ignored by the Booker Prize, not even making the long list for the prestigious award in England.
This is a complex novel, moving along the timeline between a few weeks after September 11, 2001 and three years later, when the upheaval created by the terrorist attack starts to become a healing memory with persistent repercussions. Details of life and the mindset in New York and of the U.S. at large are nicely detailed, but the most compelling narrative is the way the terrorist attack disrupts and almost anihilates the marriage of the protagonist.
Interwoven with the marriage break-up is the main character's pursuit of the game of cricket in New York, and his involvement with a shady character who wants to popularize the game in the U.S. What's the connection between the two story lines? The main character is Dutch, reared in England, and finds in cricket a civility and a comfort that has been denied him since the departure of his wife back to her native England after September 11.
Joseph O'Neill is wonderful writer. His prose is sure-footed even as it jumps from future to present to past, never confusing the reader, and always with near-poetic language that is beautiful as well as evocative of the action on the page. Let's hope the National Book Awards later this year (2008) recognize this tremendous achievement.