Netherland

“With echoes of The Great Gatsby, Joseph O’Neill’s stunning new novel, Netherland, provides a resonant meditation on the American Dream.” - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Exquisitely written...one of the most remarkable post-colonial novels I have ever read.” - James Wood, The New Yorker

“Many have tried to write a great American novel. Joseph O'Neill has succeeded.” - Joseph O'Connor

“A dense, intelligent novel.” - Publisher’s Weekly

“Netherland is suspenseful, artful, psychologically pitch-perfect, and a wonderful read.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

“I devoured it in three thirsty gulps.”
- Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

         F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, his great American novel, is a sacrosanct work of literature in the English language. Few dare toy with such comparisons, for one would immediately question the critic’s palate (and perhaps sanity). When I read the initial wave of compliment Joseph O'Neill's latest, "Neterland" (Pantheon, 2008), received, I thought it impossible to ignore. Critics across the country were dropping Gatsby like the name of a famous friend. Madness, right?
         While Fitzgerald, like Nick Carraway, idolized the opulence of the 1920s, he was uncomfortable with the unrestrained materialism and declining morality which saturated the decade. Joseph O’Neill, born Irish and raised primarily in Holland, manages a similar rapport with his narrator, Hans. Hans van den Broek is an indecisive equities analyst of similar breed living in New York City. Hans, his British-born wife Rachel, and their son Jake, lived in a mod TriBeCa loft until the events of 9/11 forced their family further up town. O’Neill uses the characters and events around Hans to at once exhibit the intricacies of a faltering marriage and reveal an unassuming sub-culture of cricket players embedded in the new Big Apple, a city at heart stricken with paranoia and anger in the immediate post-9/11 world. Though, the book is not merely bi-lateral. “Netherland” is a capacious novel, holding everything.
         Like Fitzgerald, the vocabulary often sways toward decadence. The comparison even proves apt in character to space relationships. The way in which Hans’ wife, Rachel, moves about their Hotel Chelsea apartment carries whispered memories of Daisy Buchanan floating through the family mansion. “Her fingers were cool and limp. “Oh, Hans,” Rachel said. Her face wrinkled and she cried briefly. Then she wiped her nose and neatly swung her legs out of bed and went quickly to the bathroom: she is a helplessly brisk woman. I removed my coat and sat down on the floor, my back resting against the wall. I listened intently: she was splashing running water over her face and brushing her teeth. She returned and sat in the corner armchair, clutching her legs to her chest. She had a speech of her own to give.”
         In writing about a character emotionally constrained, O’Neill lets the life of Hans loom large in scope. There is an often discussed scene in this work featuring Hans, his distant son, and Google Earth. Of the moment, Dwight Garner for The New York Times wrote that it is “among the most moving set pieces I’ve read in a recent novel.” The scene captures the quality of tragic limitations within a marriage fractured, split ocean wide by a trial separation. There immediately develops a sympathy with the ache of this removed father in his moment of desperation, a desperation to recognize something familiar about his family across the Atlantic, even if it only be an inflatable pool viewed from many thousand feet above. I feel compelled to share this bit, but I’ll save it for you. The segment is paced perfectly and wouldn’t shine as brightly out of context.
         Despite the combination of passive-aggressive abuse and volcanic diatribes, it never feels as if the marriage is completely lost. These characters are surprisingly mature; surprising because of the swath of eccentricities alive in contemporary literature. The separation oddly feels both uncomfortable and completely appropriate. This works perhaps because of Rachel’s maternal ethics and Hans’ desire to remain a good guy. His is an active desire, one of which all good guys could tell of.
         While visiting his wife and son in England, Hans overhears Rachel discussing their marriage with her father. It is then that he is alerted to the possibility of some clandestine preexistent injuries in Rachel which may also be contributing to their downfall, that maybe it isn’t completely his fault. Here O’Neill displays his mastery of the long sentence and Hans’ lofty realm of thought.“I concluded, feverishly, that here was a development— an unknown hinterland to our marriage which, if jointly and equally explored, might lead to discoveries that would change everything; and the prospect filled me with a theorist’s lunatic excitement and those daydreams of room service and afternoons gobbling blackberries and pineapple slices while we navigated the uncharted reaches of our psyches.”
         As mentioned, the book, though towering over its peers, is of the post-9/11 lot. The restraint I’m certain O’Neill exercised is worth applause. Most statements of a political nature, certainly the leftist sentiments, are reserved for Rachel who uses them to defend her determination to raise Jake outside America. “You want Jake to grow up with an American perspective,” she asks Hans, “...you want him to believe that Saddam Hussein sent those planes into the Towers?” Hans thinks himself to be a political dimwit, made uncomfortable by his inability to join the most common conversation since the attack, so soapbox symposiums are averted.
         The single constant throughout the history of Hans is cricket, a bat and ball sport known to most outside the United States. Some of O’Neill’s most impassioned prose is inspired by the sport. It is over this shared passion which Hans begins his ambivalent friendship with the Gatsbyesque Chuck Ramkissoon. Chuck is a charismatic, charming and shadowy Trinidadian business man who hopes to re-introduce the game of cricket to America. “I say we must claim our rightful place in this wonderful country. Cricket has a long history in the United States, actually. Benjamin Franklin himself was a cricket man,” Chuck explains to those having just finished a game at the second rate Walker Park facilities. The pairing of Chuck Ramkissoon and Hans van den Broek, a self-described “man to whom an apology of almost any kind is acceptable,” allows for a brilliant journey through an “other” New York, a New York of immigrants and dreamers of every nationality. Chuck speaks with a casual passion, indefatigably, virtuosically. “He likes nothing better than to put his bare feet on the dashboard and hit me with an aphorism or a fact,” says Hans of Chuck. Chuck Ramkissoon is an enigma to be met face to page, so here I digress.
         "Netherland" doesn’t turn on plot. Rachel, thinking in terms of the grand narrative, questions “the whole story” of their marriage. The Chuck Ramkissoon saga is a study of character and unprecedented interaction. Although I discussed them almost separately, Rachel and Chuck, Love and Friendship, Fear and Loyalty all exist together throughout this brilliant novel.
         “Netherland” is an absolute example of sweeping talent. O’Neill delivers a virtuoso performance and his voice, like the maimed metropolis he so clearly adores, will not slumber.