Book Review: Netherland

James D. Watts - Tulsa World

Jun 18, 2008

O'Neill's 'Netherland' a haunting look at new American Dream

It tends to happen about once a year: Some new novel gets ballyhooed as being on a par with "The Great Gatsby."

This comparison has been made about books that have become classics in their own right (Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road," for example), and books that pretty much sank without a trace -- some deservedly so, others not (Dan McCall's "Bluebird Canyon," to name one).

But Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland" is one of the few books -- maybe the only book -- for which the comparison to Fitzgerald's great American novel seems appropriate.

This isn't to say that O'Neill's novel is some kind of slavish imitation, some modern-day gloss on the characters and events of "Gatsby." It's very much its own original thing, even though O'Neill does evoke -- regularly, but with wonderful subtlety -- motifs and images from Fitzgerald.

What "Netherland" does share with "The Great Gatsby" is prose that is dense and beautiful, but always accessible, filled with striking phrases that are at once startling and perfectly minted. It has a narrator who is an outsider in the world he describes, and an enigmatic and doomed dreamer at its center. Most importantly, "Netherland" has a marvelous understanding of that grand and nebulous thing known as "the American dream."

And what is the American dream, but the hope of new possibilities? To put it more bluntly, the American dream is the ability to run away from our pasts and start all over again somewhere else. The New World is the promise of a new and better life.

That was what those "Dutch sailors' eyes" were seeing when they glimpsed the "fresh green breast of the new world," as Fitzgerald put it on the final page of "The Great Gatsby."

As "Netherland" begins, a different kind of Dutchman -- a financial analyst named Hans van den Broek -- is off to the New World, not to start over, but to just "drop in on New York for a year or three" with his English wife and their child, then return home to London.

Of course it isn't that easy or simple. Hans and his family are displaced by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, ending up in the Chelsea Hotel. It isn't long after this that his wife informs him that the time has come to return to England -- although she doesn't want Hans to come along.

It's about this time that Hans first encounters Chuck Ramkissoon, a native of Trinidad who is a figure in New York City's surprisingly strong cricket community.

Yes, cricket -- that most English of games, so laden with rules and traditions that it has become a symbol of sportsmanship ("It's not cricket").

That's something Chuck extols the first time Hans sees him, breaking up a potentially violent situation at a match, then giving players a kind of sermon about how cricket "more than any other sport is a lesson in civility." That is why, Chuck says, "we have an extra responsibility to play the game right We must earn our rightful place in this wonderful country."

But maybe a lesson in civility will only be lost on "this wonderful country." Chuck's dream is build a world-class cricket ground in Brooklyn, which he wants to call "Bald Eagle Field" -- it's a name, he believes, that properly evokes the grandeur of his adopted homeland. He's got the place and for a while he and Hans tend to it, carefully preparing the grass surface on which, in Chuck's mind, a panoply of Americans -- all races, all colors, all religions, all everything -- in brilliant white clothes will bat and bowl in harmony.

It's not going to work, however. We know from the first pages that Chuck is dead, brutally and callously murdered, probably by those involved in the unusual numbers game he was running to finance his dream.

We also know that Hans has reconciled with his wife and is living again in London, and that while he is where he knows he belongs, he has discovered that, as one of his business associated told him, "New York's a very hard place to leave."

That's because New York, in spite of the violence inflicted on it, in spite of its own innumerable flaws, still embodies that dream of America -- that fresh start, that ever-green hope that something better, something perfect is out there, just slightly beyond on our grasp.

"Netherland" is simply a gorgeous piece of fiction -- compelling and luxurious, sad and funny, and profoundly haunting. It's a novel that will stay with you for days and weeks after you've set it aside.

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