Review
The astonishing story of an outsider in New York and his salvation through sport.
- Netherland
- Fourth Estate
Netherland
When you think of sport and New York you think of baseball: the Yankees, the Mets, the legendary Brooklyn Dodgers.
Or basketball: the Knicks playing in Madison Square Gardens and the ever present pickup games all over the city; as much a part of the New York cinematic landscape as red buses are of London’s. You would never, ever think of cricket. Cricket and New York don’t belong in the same universe. Yet for Hans van den Broek, the narrator of Joseph O’Neill’s new novel Netherland, cricket becomes the way in which he survives in New York for the two years he spends there on his own after his wife leaves him.
Hans and his wife Rachel move to New York from London in 1998, buy an apartment in TriBeCa, have a son, Jake, and are happy. Then 9/11 happens. Their apartment is suddenly uninhabitable and they move, temporarily, to the famed Chelsea Hotel. Here they are assailed by the fear that they are living in a war zone. Rachel, increasingly scared and angered by the American government’s position, decides to leave and take Jake with her. She does not want Hans to come with them, and so begins his lost, unhappy years alone in New York.
A chance encounter with a cricket playing taxi driver leads Hans to the cricket club in Staten Island where he rekindles his old love of the sport. This provides him with the only stable fixture in the life he is now sleepwalking through. Through it he meets a new friend, Chuck Ramkissoon. Chuck is a larger than life figure, a wheeler and dealer who runs a kosher sushi business and an illegal numbers racket and has plans to build an enormous cricket stadium in Brooklyn. By returning cricket to its rightful place as ‘the first modern team sport in America’ Chuck hopes to change the country. He wants to give America ‘something in common with the Hindus and Muslims’.
The story opens in 2006 when Hans, now back in London and reunited with his wife, is called by an American journalist who tells him that Chuck’s body has been found in the Gowanus Canal, a notorious repository of mob victims. As in any good novel – and this is a very good novel – there are many strands to this story: life in New York City post 9/11; the immigrant experience; race; marriage; identity. For all that he feels he is simply drifting through life in these years, Hans is an acute observer of the worlds around him: the bohemian oddness of the Chelsea Hotel, the loyalty and camaraderie of the shabby cricket club, the various neighbourhoods of Chuck’s Brooklyn, his own loneliness – ‘flying on Google’s satellite function, night after night I surreptitiously travelled to England…my son’s dormer was visible’.
O’Neill has written a wonderful New York novel as perhaps only an immigrant can. This is a major book by an Irish writer and you should read it now; it’s obviously destined for greatness.
