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Cricket at Van Cortland Park in the Bronx (Image: kptyson)

Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland has been described as a ‘great American novel’.  I’m not quite sure Netherland carries the  thematic weight to grant it such immortality. But in its essential retelling of the story of an outsider’s insider whose pursuit of a Manhattan Dream is rendered hollow by corruption, Joseph O’Neill’s novel bears comparison to The Great Gatsby (I’m pretty chuffed I spotted the parallels before I read James Wood’s review in The New Yorker).

O’Neill’s Gatsby is Chuck Ramsikoon, a lyrically gifted Trinidadian-Indian whose grand scheme is to build a cricket stadium – “Bald Eagle Field” – in New York.  It is his friendship with the narrator, Dutch-born oil industry analyst Hans van den Broek, that drives the novel.  Instead of jazz-age Long Island, we find ourselves in a present day New York of immigrants – peopled by Indian bankers, Ukrainian real estate agents, Pakistani restauranteurs and Turkish angels.

Among this population of expatriated characters, cricket is a perfect metaphor for the lives of outsiders in America, played out on the boundaries of society. As Chuck says early in the novel: “You want a tast of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of a cricketer. Put on white to feel black.“

Image: caribb

The book is a skilfully written travelogue of linked memories, leaping from pre-Credit Crunch London to post-9/11 New York; from beach holidays in Kerala to childhood in well-ordered suburbs of The Hague. Jumps of place and time occur suddenly inside chapters and within paragraphs and sentences, and yet not once does the reader get lost. Everything hangs together.

The thing that prevents Netherland being a great novel is the numb self-obsession of the first person narrator. Although you see everything through his eyes and recollections, Hans as a person remains (for me) too cold and distant to feel real.  (Although O’Neill’s depiction of the often limpid life of the bachelor abroad is accurate enough !)

Netherland is undoubtedly a novel of its time: the touchstone moments of the pre-Obama age (the fall of the twin towers, the invasion of Iraq and the Indian Ocean tsunami)  are all present, exerting influence without ever being overplayed.  If humanity survives in good enough shape to produce literary critics in 50 years time, it may well be to Netherland that these critics turn to work out what the heck we were all thinking in the first decade of the 21st century.

Image: catface3