Netherland: A Novel by Joseph O'Neill Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Netherland: A Novel
Book Review: 5 stars
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a guy's book, written from a guy's perspective. It dealt more with the thoughts of a man going through separation. I liked the quick changes of time and place. Entertaining to read - probably best to read it in less than a week.Book Review: A Beautiful Novel
Summary: 5 Stars
I am a high school English teacher, and this is one of the rare books to be written in the last few years that I can definitely see appearing on someone's syllabus. For O'Neill has written a beautiful novel that holds tremendous insight into the human condition, contains amazing descriptive power, and makes poignant sense of our contemporary world. Woven throughout is the sport of cricket, which acts as a metaphor for the decline of a certain lost ideal, an ideal of hope still held in the minds of the panoply of immigrants that populate this tale, even as they see the ideal falling apart around them. Also, it's hard to put down (suspense is not a bad quality for serious fiction!). Perhaps it does take a foreign narrator to make sense of the confusion that is America. For readers of literary fiction, this novel is certainly a must read.Book Review: A European in New York City, Post 9-11
Summary: 5 Stars
Mr. O'Neill has published a rambling account of one family's encounter with the attacks upon the World Trade Center and its impact upon the marrage of Rachel and Hans van de Broek. The writing is riveting and compelling as Hans is the first person narrator who tells his story in a stream of consciousness. For the reader looking for a linear story, this is not that novel. But it is also a novel about cricket (the sport), the men who play it, and Hans' friendship with Chuck Ramkissoon of Trinidad. This opens up the novel to be a tale of New York City surviving 9-11. This is one of the few times where a book is too short.Book Review: A Happy Ending for the West
Summary: 5 Stars
There is a lot to recommend in Netherland: Joseph O'Neil's elegant and propulsive prose, a magnificent tour of New York past and present, and a peek into the world of cricket. As intoxicating as these pleasures are, it's the narrative they embellish that proves the richest and most provocative element of Netherland. Here's the story in a nutshell: three-member family in crisis + high-rolling Wall Street dad + 9/11 + walk on the wild-side = family denouement. Sound familiar? How about an eerie echo of Don DeLillo's Falling Man? DeLillo isn't the only American author O'Neil finds ways to contact: There is Mark Twain: the relationship of the two main characters Hans and C. Ramkissoon bears a striking resemblance to Huck Finn and Jim, even though Ramkissoon also bears a striking resemblance to Jay Gatsby. Then there's the special men's world of cricket resonating with Bernard Malamoud's The Natural. What makes the novel so special is Joseph O'Neil's ability to dig into a long-standing American theme like race or sports through a technique of slipstreamed multiple narratives that complicate and update the vitality of those narratives. There's noting easy in the updates either: no happy ending to Hans and C. Ramkissoon's relationship; the lost-and-found Eden of The Natural transformed into the civilizing outcome of brutal empire. In both the overall similarities and the cracks of difference, O'Neil provides a methodology to expand communication beyond the words on the page and suggest a space for the reader to do what readers do best: create meaning.
Nowhere is the density or the troubling position of O'Neil's metaphors so finely etched as in the brilliant final set-piece, which takes place at the London Eye. At first glance, the choice of setting signifies the engineering and architectural triumph of the "New London," but exploring just a bit will reveal the Eye as part of the Millenial year, a celebration of the upcoming third (Christian) millennium. Not to stop there, Hans tracks all the way back to Greece, noting the sunset as "Phoebus...up to his oldest and best tricks." I'm guessing you're starting to see the picture. Unlike the grim detente of a new social order that closes Falling Man, O'Neil provides for a completely plausible happy ending for his family. There is certainly no greater testimonial to the lasting mythos and continuing resilience of the West than this scene of familial re-unification across generations. Don't get me wrong. O'Neal isn't pandering to Hollywood here; he's sharing the complicated world of his desire and asking you to come clean, to make a decision about the meaning of his book. Either you buy into the very idea of a happy ending and find sustenance in the forces of history and the peculiarly Western idea of progress, or you don't and read Netherland as boosterism for a culture that has wandered into the dust bin of history without even knowing it. I'm still deciding. (That's a good thing.)
Book Review: A Modern 'Great Gatsby' With Unforgettable Doomed Dreamer
Summary: 5 Stars
'Netherland' is a powerfully written novel that's deservedly being called the latest Great American Novel. The book's an introspective, slow-paced and mournful story of New York City that has the audacity to evoke both 9/11 and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'
The novel concerns Dutch-born financial analyst Hans van den Broek, an affluent denizen of New York's Chelsea Hotel who loses the joy and purpose in his life when his wife Rachel flees both the city and their marriage after the trauma of 9/11, taking their infant son with her. Hans tells his own story, but devotes considerable energy to being the captivated narrator of another man's story -- a fast-talking and grandiose Trinidadian immigrant named Chuck Ramkissoon, a friend whose larger-than-life plan for achieving success and respectability in America is as doomed as that of Jay Gatsby.
This is not a spoiler. Readers learn early on that Ramkissoon has been found tied up and murdered in the Gowanus Canal.
The novel spends a great deal of time on cricket, the only spark in Hans' dark existence after his wife leaves. Although I know nothing of the sport that I didn't pick up from this book, it doesn't detract from the impact of O'Neill's long and lyrical passages about the role of the game in Hans' life, its role in the lives of first-generation American immigrants like Ramkissoon, and the invisibility of the game to most citizens of the United States, where cricket serves as a stand-in for other exotic foreign subjects we might want to know better after 9/11 shrank the planet. I was amused by the notion, held deeply by the cricket players in the book, that the U.S. will not become truly civilized until it embraces cricket. "There's a limit to what Americans understand," one of Ramkissoon's potential investors tells Hans. "That limit is cricket." Ramkissoon's big dream is to build a cricket pitch on an abandoned airfield in Brooklyn, believing it will attract the world's best teams, worldwide TV audiences and the long-withheld affection of Americans.
O'Neill packs the novel's 256 pages with observations about New Yorkers that are worth repeating. Two of my favorites occur in rapid succession when the heartsick and unsociable Hans finally lures a woman home, providing a welcome respite from his morose internal dialogue:
"... while I changed, Danielle wandered around my apartment, as was her privilege: people in New York are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they're invited to step into. ...
"Like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing."
In one conversation Ramkissoon uses a bit of Trinidadian slang that I really like. He derides one of his more obnoxious business associates as a pawmewan, a poor-me complainer who is always feeling sorry for himself. Hans is a huge pawmewan whose personal suffering occupies a majority of the book, but O'Neill describes the grieving and loss associated with failed marriage and parenthood with great skill.
I read that blogger Janice Harayda believes that Hans is an unreliable narrator, a prospect that adds considerable intrigue to Ramkissoon's murder. I don't know if I buy that, because O'Neill doggedly refuses to make Hans' life dramatic, devoting several pages at one point to an intolerably long day he wastes at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Although 'Netherland' is by no stretch a thriller, O'Neill manages in Chuck Ramkissoon to create an unforgettable American character -- like Jay Gatsby another dreamer dead in the water.