For a while, as you read Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill, you feel like you’re kind of being drowned in cotton balls. The foggy state of mind of the narrator, Hans van den Broek, makes everything he experiences in post-9/11 New York a kind of vague, almost pointless narrative that threatens to drag the reader into the same bog. Yet at the same time, you’re almost thankful that this is not another typical 9/11 novel, even though that momentous event forms the backdrop of everything that goes on.
Hans has been living in New York for a couple of years as an equities analyst, transferred there when his wife, Rachel, had a yen to move from their home in England. After the attacks of 9/11 happen, the couple has to relocate to the very odd Chelsea Hotel, farther uptown, and gradually Rachel feels she simply has to go back to England with their young son, Jake. The marriage itself has been foundering, and Rachel suggests that she and Hans need this time apart to re-evaluate everything.
So Hans is left on his own, and soon ends up kind of falling into a group of immigrants, mostly from the Caribbean, that plays cricket in a park on Staten Island on the weekends. And through this group, he meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian immigrant who always talks a good-albeit-questionable story, and has big plans to build an international cricket stadium in Brooklyn.
Through Hans’s eyes, we see people and parts of New York that you rarely hear about, and that the wealthier New Yorkers don’t even know are there. Hans has the oddest neighours at the Chelsea Hotel – one man routinely wears angel wings and a wedding dress – yet they form a loose community that finds ways to support its members. For example, at one point everyone joins in at a birthday party for a dog, held in the lobby. And later on, in the summer of 2003, they all have an impromptu party on the roof when the big blackout hits the northeastern corner of the continent.
Only two things really rouse Hans from his two-year long semi-conscious stupor: the game of cricket, and his son Jake, when he flies to England to visit Rachel and the boy every second weekend. Cricket, in fact, is something of a metaphor of Hans’s life, having long periods where nothing of substance appears to be happening, yet in which it is always percolating under the surface somewhere. In the same way, it’s only when he finally realizes that Chuck is involved in some pretty shady and probably dangerous financial dealings that Hans finally decides he’s moving back to England at last, to try to take his life in some direction, whether it’s with his wife or not.
The thing I liked about this book was that while it was a post-9/11 novel, it wasn’t directly about 9/11. Sure, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq both happen during the time period of the book, and Rachel calls Hans to talk about being part of the immense worldwide protests that took place in February of 2003 before the American aggression against Iraq. So that’s always a backdrop, and perhaps contributes in some way to Hans’s aimlessness. Yet through the cricket games, the lives of the Chelsea Hotel denizens, and Chuck’s peregrinations around the city, you see people going about their ordinary business.
At the same time, you never really connect with people in the book. You, like Hans, are more of an observer than a participant. And though the reader sees the story from Hans’s viewpoint, we don’t really connect with him either, although we do get moments of insight, especially when he remembers things from his childhood and teen years in his native Holland.
The title, Netherland, is clearly meant to resonate somehow with New York’s original founding as New Amsterdam, a colony of the Netherlands. But it just doesn’t seem to connect. The only interpretation I could really apply to the title was that for Hans, New York was truly a “nether land,” a place where he was separated from his own history and even from his true self.
But beyond that, I found it hard to become engaged with this story. Chuck did become more interesting as you got to know him better, but he still wasn’t all that likeable. Hans was rather dull, and Rachel didn’t seem all that attractive a character either. While it was interesting to learn more about the everyday New York, I never actually figured out the point of the story, which disappointed me. I guess, for me, that fog never really did lift.
For other, somewhat more positive reviews of the book, check here:
- Pen in One Hand, Cricket Bat in the Other, by Charles McGrath, in the New York Times “Books” section on May 17, 2008.
- The Ashes, by Dwight Garner, in the New York Times “Sunday Book Review” section on May 18, 2008.
