Steve's review of Netherland (original) (raw)

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Steve's Reviews > Netherland

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

Netherland (Vintage Contemporaries)
by

236411

If you feel culturally discombobulated reading this most recent book by Joseph O’Neill (the prize-winning half-Irish, half-Turkish writer) narrated by Hans (the Dutch investment analyst working in New York by way of London) whose two main topics are cricket (as played by ex-pat West Indians) and his wife (the Venusian to his Martian), that may have been part of the point. Hans doesn’t feel completely at home in any of his worlds. He confesses to being lost and clueless. The more you read, though, the more you don’t believe it. In fact, there are several examples where you’re convinced he’s sandbagging. He’ll say he doesn’t understand something, but as he elaborates, you realize he picks up on plenty. Questions of why people are the way they are mystify us all, and for Hans the puzzlement is at an advanced level. The issues he raises are themselves evidence of insight. It helps, too, that the writing is so rich.

Part of what I liked about the book is how the foreign is made more familiar. The bits on the cricketing subculture were actually pretty interesting. It was also intriguing to get an outsider’s point of view on the competitive theorizing that the well-educated applied to society’s ills in the aftermath of 9/11. O’Neill was quoted as saying this was a novel of voice. With Hans, he had a compelling one, complete with nuance and lilt.

It was also a book with stories. The most vivid one involved a larger-than-life Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon. Chuck had a missionary’s zeal for cricket, an immigrant’s hope for the future, and a wheeler-dealer’s sense of compromise between legality and success. Hans had his own story, too, with a wife and young son at the heart of it. New York at that time was not the only shaky ground. Between Chuck’s ambitious dreams and Hans’s lifting fog, what stories there were to be told carried their bigger points well enough.

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Reading Progress

August 11, 2009 – Shelved

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