Joseph O'Neill won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner award for this novel, Netherland, which features a different side of post-911 New York and introduces a wide array of quirky characters - immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality. It was heavily favoured to win the Man Booker prize of its year and well reviewed.
"A brilliant book" - Barack Obama
Hans van den Broeck (a banker form the Netherlands) finds himself marooned amidst the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel, his wife and daughter having moved back to England. Shut out of his damaged apartment on 911, he wanders into a New York he didn't know existed. Stumbling onto downtown game of Cricket, he discovers a vibrant subculture and befriends one Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian wheeler-dealer who owns a chain of kosher sushi bars. A player in Holland, Hans joins a Cricket club of Africans and Asians - people from St. Kitts, Pakistan, Dhaka, West Indies, Tajikistan, Jamaica, Antilles, England, Ethiopia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Italy, Guatamala, Russia, Armenia, Ghana, Bangladesh - amateur and competitive in borrowed rundown parks all over the city ('bush cricket'). Chuck takes him under his wing, makes him an associate in his dream of constructing a world class Cricket arena on an abandoned airfield. Cricket is huge world-wide, and the franchise rights are worth a fortune. Also, he's running an illegal underground city-wide numbers game on the side - Chuck is a man of enterprise. Together they travel to Russian Brooklyn, Red Hook, and the Jamaican district where Chuck lives with his wife.
We know from the opening chapter, things don't go well for Chuck, and while Netherland starts full of interest and diversity, Hans seems to flounder without his family. He begins to meander and fight with his wife long distance, as she is ready to move on. The second half of the novel is more about Hans finding his way and trying to obtain his drivers license, rather than the promise of community and international cricket.
Netherland has a lot to recommend in it, but as it shifted gears halfway, it lost some of its charm for me. An unusual book filled with Cricket and sports history, with countless New York stories of interest as it began, but ultimately, it wasn't one way or another for me.
2009 / Hardcover / 256 pages
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