Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

My wife and I share a love for the Booker Prize, and I have slowly but steadily been making my way through the past winners. Seeing as time keeps moving on, I keep falling further behind on this quest. This year, I decided to be a little pro-active. When the longlist was released, I ordered the two books listed as favorites: Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. With my luck, this practically guarantees a dark horse victory. But Netherland has also received widespread praise received from critics as diverse as Michiko Kakutani and James Wood, so it seemed worth reading anyhow. Despite this broad (though not unanimous) praise, Netherland is notable most for its unfulfilled potential.

The story has a way of appearing exotic no matter the reader. For Americans, it's probably cricket, a sport utterly unintelligible to most of us (O'Neill does little to remedy this). For the Brits who do know cricket, it's likely the immigrant streets of Brooklyn. For those born and raised in Holland and then transplanted to New York via London with a wife and child in tow only to find refuge in the subterranean immigrant cricket community... the setting might seem familiar.

The book carries an overwhelming sense of displacement. This is personified in the protagonist, Hans van den Broek, who is an immigrant twice-over. Dutch born and raised, he moved to New York after starting a career as a financial analyst in London and marrying an English lawyer. His wife, Rachel, was the catalyst for the trans-Atlantic move, but in the wake of 9/11 she took their young son and returned to England. In her absence, Hans discovers a cricket league and rekindles his youthful sporting passion. Cricket serves as a further venue for Hans' displacement, as he refuses to modify his style for the limitations of the New World field:

There was nothing, in principle, to stop me from changing my game, from taking up the cow-shots and lofted bashes in which many of my teammates specialized. But it was, I felt, different for them... They could, and did, modify their batting without spiritual upheaval. I could not.

As the book starts, it is 2006. Hans is reunited with his wife in England. The murdered body of his friend Chuck Ramkissoon has just been found in a New York canal. The rest of the book centers heavily on the time between Rachel's departure and Hans' return to England, his residence at the Hotel Chelsea and the motley crew of neighbors that surround him, and the arc of his relationship with Ramkissoon.

O'Neill has received numerous plaudits for his riff on Jay Gatsby in the form of Ramkissoon, the Trinidadian entrepreneur/hustler. Certainly, there is something to be admired in the attempt to transplant one of literature's most-famous characters from white bread on Long Island to West Indian on Flatbush Avenue. The allusion is sufficiently obvious and self-conscious that it necessarily fails by comparison to the original, but there are worse literary crimes than proving inferior to Fitzgerald. Indeed, Ramkissoon is the best drawn character in the novel, and the time spent in his world are the high points of the story.

It is Hans' marital situation that proves to be Netherland's ultimate undoing. Even James Wood can't help but take note of this misstep, noting that "Rachel's hostility seems a little undeveloped, and one suspects her absence from New York to be merely the necessary fictional trigger for Hans's hospitable sloth." This is classic Wood understatement. The truth is that Rachel's character is a superficial mass of cliches; she retreats from America because it's not safe after 9/11 and Hans failed her in some amorphous, undefined way; she refuses to return because of neocon imperialism:

[S]he told me, in the tone of a person discussing a grocery list, that she had definitely decided not to return to the United States, at least not before the end of the Bush administration or any successor administration similarly intent on a military and economic domination of the world. It was no longer a question of physical security, she said, although that of course remained a factor. It was a question, rather, of not exposing Jake to an upbringing in an "ideologically diseased" country, as she put it, a "mentally ill, sick, unreal" country whose masses and leaders suffered from extraordinary and self-righteous delusions about the United States, the world, and indeed, thanks to the influence of the fanatical evangelical Christian movement, the universe, delusions that had the effect of exempting the United States from the very rules of civilized and lawful and rational behavior it so mercilessly sought to enforce on others.

As a diatribe on the defects of America's recent foreign policy, this is powerful (if hyperbolic) stuff. But as the only explanation for Hans' extended family separation, this is ridiculous. Rachel separates her son from his father, Hans does nothing about it, and this is never justified by any decent exploration of Rachel's motives or Hans' paternal obligations (or his flouting of them). To make matters worse, their inevitable reunion, forecast from page 5, is comically simplistic; after years of living apart, she begins a relationship with another man. Hans moves back to England, they live apart for a year, she moves in with the other man, he jilts her, she gets back together with Hans, suggests marriage counseling, and that's it. I'm really not leaving anything out; this narrative exposition takes just a few paragraphs over several pages.

There is no doubting the intrigue of an entire sporting world existing in the invisible immigrant world of New York City. With O'Neill's international pedigree, and the mystery that cricket remains to America, this is a literary setting worth mining. O'Neill can be forgiven for trying too hard to turn Ramkissoon into a 21st-century Gatsby. But Nick Carraway is seamless as Gatsby's foil; Hans van den Broek's life is an unbelievable construct.