Netherland: A Novel by Joseph O'Neill Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Netherland: A Novel
Book Review: Beautiful and Moving
Summary: 5 Stars
"Netherland" is a beautiful and moving story about the fragility of the lives we build for ourselves, of our sense of personal identity and of our connectedness to the world at large. As everyone knows by now, the story is set in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and turns on the (temporary) marital breakup of Dutch-born Hans van den Broeck, who finds himself rootless and at a loss in New York. Hans is the character we identify with and the one through whose eyes we see the world, but probably the more memorable figure from the book is Chuck Ramkisoon, the Trinidadian would-be Gatsby, a swindler type, who dreams of creating a professional cricket empire in the States. The interplay between what "isn't cricket" and what is ties together the theme and plot of the book throughout, and O'Neil handles the non-chronological structure of the book to very good effect. "Netherland" is really one of the best novels I've read in years, and unlike the badly over-hyped potboiler "Edgar Sawtelle" this book really lives up to expectations.Book Review: Beautiful but understated, rather like cricket
Summary: 4 Stars
Hans van den Broek is a pleasant chap: observant, often witty, cricket-loving, and kind to the strangest of strangers. This characterization of the narrator, along with some beautiful and perceptive prose, is what gives Netherland its special appeal, for this is a retrospective novel of sparse drama and little suspense. Another attraction is the unusual milieu: the New York cricket scene, and its largely South Asian and West Indian membership. A second milieu, the famously offbeat Chelsea Hotel, is a tad predictable as an urban microcosm (as is the amiable eccentricity of its inhabitants) but O'Neill refreshes the device with gentle humor. Passages set in Holland and London add further cosmopolitanism, quite fitting to this story of global migrants.
Chuck Ramkissoon, Hans's driven and ethically suspect friend, is a Trinidadian Gatsby for our times, a self-centered dreamer with a shady fortune who still inspires affection and loyalty. And there's much of Nick Carraway about Hans: a level-headed outsider both drawn to and wary of his exotic friend, a capable man who makes a decent living in the city but opts to follow his heart and leave. Where Netherland differs most from Gatsby is in its embrace of New York. This is a "post-9/11 novel," or so Michiko Kakutani described it in the New York Times. While there's some discussion of the malaise that followed the attacks - the strain threatens to scupper Hans' marriage to Rachel (a smart but shrill Brit) - O'Neill is more interested in celebrating New York's endless power to create possibility for new generations of immigrants. NYC is a vortex of enthusiasm, and though Hans is rather unhappy there, he warms to its energizing, regenerating effect on others.
Without overdoing it, O'Neill peppers his tale with arresting imagery. The Staten Island cricket field where Hans plays is surrounded by houses with elaborate gardens. "For as long as anyone can remember, the local residents have tolerated the occasional crash of a cricket ball, arriving like a gigantic meteoritic cranberry, into their flowering shrubbery." O'Neill does a fine job of explaining cricket to the American majority without boring the initiated.
The story has a meandering structure, switching back and forth in time, a fractured chronology that encourages connections and contrasts. But it's overdone. It's self-consciously literary. The main effect is to de-emphasize drama and keep the focus on observation, yet O'Neill could have struck a better balance between action and thought. We have the makings of a much more emotionally compelling story - What will happen to Chuck and his dream of a first-class Brooklyn cricket ground? What will happen to Hans and Rachel's marriage? - but these outcomes are revealed within the first two pages. Rather like a five-day game of cricket between teams unafraid of a draw, the novel is an exercise in understatement, eliciting only moderate emotional investment, mildly pleasurable with occasional flashes of brilliance.
Since critics (NYT, New Yorker) consider Netherland exemplary, it seems to me that Tom Wolfe's complaint of 20 years ago is still valid: modern fiction remains too concerned with literary effect and intellectual contemplation and too little interested in enthralling stories. I'm not arguing for gratuitous pushing of readers' buttons, or for catharsis, but for the kind of alternately unsettling and inspiring storytelling that Wolfe advocated when he called for a return to the spirit of Dickens. The "post-9/11 novel" surely deserves as much.
Book Review: Best novel I have read in manyyears
Summary: 5 Stars
I loved this book. I lack the patience to read many novels but the greatness of the writing in this book overwhelmed my frustration with fiction, much of which is either too simplistic or too self-conscious.
I didn't see this book, as others have, as a "9/11 in NYC" book. Not even close. It can be read on one level as simply the narrative of a man's thoughts about two important relationships in his life and no more, and in that basic frame, it is gorgeously written, and soars at the end (which to me contrasted favorably with Oscar Wao, the one other excellent novel I read this year, which felt anticlimatic at the end, as if the author had to force an ending because the book had reached a certain point where there was nowhere better to go). In this context, New York City is just a place where most of it happens and the 9/11 references are almost obligatory and the book would have seemed strained had it not made some.
Then, of course there is the level at which it is a meditation on the idea of America in a post-9/11 world and the ironic retelling of the Gatsby story in the form of a hustler from Trinidad, and the analogue between the reconciliation between spouses with different attitudes toward the US and the need for America to reconcile with its best self were imaginative and deeply satisfying approaches to the question of the American identity in the 21st century. In this frame, the 9/11 references are of course there but the issues raised are not "9/11 in NYC" issues as much as they are "Iraq" and "Bush / Cheney Scalia destroying civil liberties" issues which are broad American issues put in play by what happened on 9/11. Such that "9/11" is more like the plot developments in a Chekhov play, or the Macguffin in a Hitchcock movie, than the focal point of the book.
I thought the other reviews of this book were extraordinarily incisive and far better than what one usually sees in this website. I think that in itself testifies implicitly to the excellence of the book. As to whether this book will stand the test of time, who knows, but it is the best novel I have read in several years.
Book Review: Book Club Purgatory
Summary: 1 Stars
I had high hopes for this book, as this was given praise in the media. I was more than disappointed -- actually angry, that I paid $25 to suffer through this dreadfully awful book. Had this not been a book club selection, I would have put it down and laid it to rest.
The author has created characters that are one dimensional -- they are so flat, that they are barely memorable. There is nothing about the characters that engender any empathy.
Then the book is so overly focused on cricket, a sport that I never realized was so boring. At least it was boring the way O'Neill paints it.
O'Neill also uses way too many words to make a point, and much of the dialogue is just unbelievable. Nobody thinks or talks in sentences like that.
I am an avid reader, and nothing irks me more than wasting precious time on a book that should have never made it into print. I would have rather eat liver (which I loathe) then read this book.
FOLLOW-UP: My book club discussed this over dinner at our last meeting. Three out of the five of us actually made it through the book. The other two surrendered and gave up halfway. We could not find anything redeeming about the book.
Being Manhattantes, we also found that the descriptions of our beloved city were oftentimes inaccurate. For example, the author paints the Chelsea Hotel as a hip place to live. The Chelsea is a "has been", and a major dump. No affluent family (as are the main characters in the book)would live there with their children. It's just too bizarre a place.
Again, I would rather eat a truckload of liver than read this awful book.
Book Review: Breathtaking and Brilliant
Summary: 5 Stars
'Netherland' is one of the finest books I have read in the past several years. Its prose is beautifully crafted. Its structure complex and satisfying. Its story deep and meditative. You will think of it for weeks after you have read its last sentences.
'Netherland' is a post-911 book. Set after the catastrophe, a Dutch born equities analyst named Hans, and Rachel his English barrister wife are pushed out of their lower Manhattan home. They take up an unsatisfactory residence in the Chelsea Hotel. Rachel decides that she must return to England with their young son. The obstensible reason is that New York is no longer safe. However, on a deeper level their marriage is unraveling. The story focuses on Hans as he struggles to come to terms with the sense of dislocation he feels in the wake of his wife and son's departure. He meanders around New York City when he is not working amidst the hordes of immigrants who populate the City, and he becomes involved with the charismatic and enigmatic Chuck Ramkissoon when he decides to take up cricket once again, the beloved game of his youth. Cricket becomes a metaphor for the dislocation of the foreigner in American, and Chuck's desire to build a cricket stadium and begin a fad for cricket in America becomes a symbol of the New American Dream.
As Fitzgerald's " The Great Gatsby' is the novel of the American Dream of his time, "Neverland" is a paen to the New American Dream of the post 911 world. In shifting time perspectives we are taken to Brooklyn, a 'netherland' of new immigrants; to The Hague where Hans was born; to modern day post 911 London and to the Trinidad of the young Chuck Ramkissoon. This brilliant novel challenges our notions of America's place in the world, and our notions of love and forgiveness
Definitely a most read. It can be compared with Ian McEwan's recent novel 'Saturday'.