Many books you forget, and a few you remember. Whenever I encounter the second happy circumstance, it’s because the writer represents for me a fresh way of feeling, becomes a new intoxicant I immediately know I can rely on. Joseph O’Neill’s remarkable novel Netherland marks the addition of a welcome newcomer to this very special list.
What such choice items have in common isn’t their subject matter but their tone of voice. The style, as Flaubert so rightly said, is the man.
It’s hard, nevertheless, to pin down this book’s style, and O’Neill’s essential mode of being. It’s whimsical, eclectic, rich in detail, self-communing, and not infrequently sad, but it’s also rather elusive.
The novel has two themes. One is the frail marriage of the narrator, Hans van den Broek, a 1.96m-tall financial analyst living in New York but brought up largely in Holland. The other is cricket, played in and around New York in a variety of overgrown, neglected parks by immigrants from Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
These determined amateurs are held together by a charismatic Trinidadian, Chuck Ramkissoon, a man with fingers in many pies, and a dreamer who envisages cricket becoming once again what he insists it was in the days of the founding fathers, a loved and widely played American game.
O’Neill’s narrative method involves looping from one topic to the next, a man remembering his past who’s happy to allow one thing to remind him of another. The result is an accumulation of episodes. The novel thus moves from life in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel (where the narrator retreats after his lawyer wife has left for London with their son following the Sept. 11 attacks) to upstate New York, Arizona, Trinidad, London, Tamil Nadu and The Hague.
It’s Hans’ fascination with Ramkissoon that holds the story together. He’s likely to become one of the keynote characters of modern literature. He allows Hans to learn to drive in his car while using the exercise to make some apparently innocent social calls. He shows him corners of New York that few readers will know, and above all plans, with his Russian backer, a vast arena that will forever catapult cricket into the American national consciousness. His motto is “Think fantastic.”
He turns out, however, also to be running an illegal Caribbean-style lottery (“People are desperate for something special”) and to be dabbling, with his Russian partner, in at times brutal property deals. He also knows a lot about birds, and has a wife and mistress whose co-existence he manages with aplomb. But his wide-ranging knowledge and comic potential are underpinned (like Falstaff’s) with something ruthless, almost mindless. “Look beneath Chuck’s surface?” comments Hans. “For what?” The novel opens with the police fishing Ramkissoon’s rotting body out of a New York canal.
The amiable game of cricket, symbolic of men’s ability to abide by civilized if arcane rules, also weaves its way through this book. Rooted in nature — turf, humidity, recent rainfall — it’s presented as a mysterious ritual capable of bringing disparate kinds of men together. “What’s the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace?” asks the ostentatious polymath. “They play a cricket match.”
Many critics — and this book has been very widely praised — point to similarities between Ramkissoon, at once generous, ambitious and irredeemably hollow, and Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. Asked about this, O’Neill said he noticed the affinity halfway through writing, but decided to carry on anyway. The comparison has hardly harmed Netherland, regarded by many as the best thing that’s happened to US fiction in a decade. In an interview not long after publication, US President Obama remarked that he was reading it.
And if style is indeed the essence of the best writing, this book aims for the heights. The story ends on the London Eye, a “glorious spray of radiuses,” where at sunset “Phoebus is up to his oldest and best tricks.” Phrases such as “existentialist gunslingers” abound, while the oddity of much of New York is everywhere displayed. Of Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, O’Neill comments: “If a troupe of Mongolian horsemen had appeared in the distance I would not have been shocked.”
Nostalgia, comedy and melancholy mix in this novel, as in the work of many stylists — Evelyn Waugh and the less consistent John Banville come to mind. As for the book’s doubling-back, episodic structure, this may be a way of incorporating a range of personal memories. O’Neill, like his narrator, was brought up largely in the Netherlands, trained as a lawyer, and has worked (and currently lives) in New York. But all writers quarry their material where they can, and few are blessed with the power of genuine invention.
The novel’s action — and quite a lot does actually happen — takes place between 2003 and 2005. Political events don’t figure prominently, obscured by more pressing local concerns. But the New York weather, and events such as the power outages of August 2003, are prominent, as are the moods of the Hudson River and the topography of Brooklyn.
Is it all symbolic, you inevitably ask yourself — the adult waif who wanders about the Chelsea Hotel complete with angel’s wings, the woman who wants to be beaten with a belt, the inflated figure of Ronald McDonald keeling over in the Thanksgiving Day streets? If it is, it’s because modern lives viewed as fragments can appear so pointless and sad, only to be redeemed (if at all) by a grand project such as a cricket arena or a marriage sustained against all the odds.
These may not be original ideas, but they’re nonetheless marvelously encapsulated in this vivid, endearing, yet strangely cool new novel.
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