A book club read. The book is about a dutch man living in New York before, during and after 9/11, a strange friendship, and Cricket. The writing style somehow reminded me of Paul Austers Leviathan. I wanted to like the book but I found it a little too boring for that. I waited for things to happen for a long time and in the end was left feeling a bit disappointed. That there was a lot of Cricket in the book didn't help. I wouldn't say it's a bad book at all, just that it didn't have enough of a plot to keep me interested.

The narrative style was very interesting in this book. In the present, Hans van den Broek is at home with his wife Rachel in London, receiving a phone call to say that his old friend Chuck Ramkissoon has been found murdered in New York. The novel is written more or less as Hans would have thought about Chuck after that phone call – in a jumble of memories, chronologically haphazard and leaping from one anecdote to another more by association than logic.

Surprisingly, it works very well. Even though the action can be in Brooklyn at one moment and in the Holland of Hans’s childhood the next, I never lost the thread. The novel is just very well put together, and slowly out of these disparate anecdotes a picture builds up of Hans, Chuck and their mysterious friendship.

Another surprising thing about this novel is that I wasn’t particularly interested in Hans or his life, but I kept on reading anyway. The obvious “hook” is the murder of Chuck, stated in the first few pages, and the expectation is that you will find out why he was dumped in the Gowanus Canal with his hands cuffed. But nobody seems very interested – Hans makes a few efforts to call a detective who doesn’t seem to care, and that’s about it. We hear vague allusions to criminal activity, but nothing specific. The novel turns out not to be about Chuck’s murder, or even really about Chuck. It’s about Hans’s attempts to deal with a failing marriage and loneliness in post-9/11 New York City.

To start with, I really disliked Hans. He reminded me a lot of people I knew in a former existence as a corporate banker – from 2000 to 2002 I worked for Citigroup on Wall Street. The emptiness and lack of feeling really depressed me, and I found it hard to care about the problems of such a privileged character – even though I know from personal experience that you can be miserable even when you’re making a lot of money. Hans grew on me as the novel went on, but not very much. So there was really no reason for me to keep reading, but somehow I did, and I enjoyed it. I think it was just the narrative that pulled me along, rewarding me with great descriptions and acute observations about two cities I know very well.

It’s been said that this is a novel about September 11, and also that it’s a novel about cricket, but I don’t think either statement is really true. Both are themes, but there’s a lot else going on. The Netherland of the title is not just about Hans being Dutch. The OED gives the following definition for ‘nether’: “designating a sphere of action or thought existing, or considered as existing below or at a lower level than the usual; esp. in netherland”. The book explores the layers of New York City, the people living below the well-known Manhattan surface, often ignored and unseen. Hans is also in the nether regions of his life – with his marriage falling apart for reasons that are completely obscure to him, he has nothing left but the familiarity of cricket and the comfort of a friendship with a man he knows both a lot and also very little about.

So the reason I liked the book is that Joseph O’Neill is a very good storyteller. The story didn’t grip me and neither did the characters, but I wanted to read on anyway, just for the pleasure of the words on the page and the clever progressions from anecdote to anecdote and tangent to tangent. After 200 pages or so spent with Hans and Chuck and Rachel, I even started to care about them a little more, but ultimately for me the payoff was the deeper themes that came through – about friendship, and loneliness, and memory and loss. It was just a very well-written, well-constructed novel that succeeded in spite of an apparent lack of interesting features. ( )

Powerful novel. On one level, it's about a man struggling to keep his family together. It's also a love letter to New York, and an examination of immigration – being the cultural outsider. I also learned something about cricket. ( )

Excellent novel set in New York post 9/11 with a background of Cricket which I am sure is alien to most Americans.The desolate background in which the hero struggles with his marriage and remembers his childhood in the Netherlands add to the mystery of his friendship with another immigrant in a city and country coming to grips with the tragedy of the World Trade Center collapse.The novel was hard to put down and held the attention of the reader until the ending.The novel has dark undertones which manifest itself in the character of Chuck and the tragic end of his vision for a revival of cricket in New York. ( )

me parecio una novela un poco frustrante. me gusta la prosa de este autor y la novela tiene muchas secciones buenas. me gusta la elegancia para articular algunas ideas. la trama sin embargo no me funciona. me parece que hay demasiados cambios entre presente y pasados. pierde propulsion. tambien se siente desenfocada. no ayuda tampoco que los personajes principales no son muy agradables. el narrador es medio bobo, la esposa es insoportable, y el amigo de trinidad es un listo. la amistad nunca se desarrolla. en realidad no hay mucha razon para lamentar su perdida. crei que iba a haber una sorpresa que explicaria la muerte, algo sobre los negocios turbios pero no, nada. ( )

Wonderful. Slow at times, but meditative almost always. The almost-dissolution of a marriage, but with the beauty of persistence and patience highlighted.

Makes me want to understand cricket. ( )

Newcomers to NYC try to make sense of post-9/11 America. A sensitive portrayal of marriage, immigration, and sports. ( )

Dutch guy, NYC immigrant life, cricket, rocky marriage--great book.

Contains probably the best prose I have read from a current author for quite some years. Odd eary atmosphere suffuses - what is not said is often more important than was. Powerful. ( )

An engrossing story very well written. It weaves in and out of various time and scenes with ease and precision. The 9/11 events are present but never in the middle of the story. And Chuck is a most mysterious character. Never thought I would spend so much time reading about cricket. ( )

[Netherland] by [[Joseph O'Neill]] warrants its acclaim. The cataclysm that was 9/11 wrecks havoc, uncertainty and destruction in the post-9/11 life of Hans as he quietly takes on each week with bat in hand.

The 9/11 touchstone isn't explicit. The impact on the corporeal world of Hans is minor at best. This highly successful commodities analyst and his corporate litigator wife are inconvenienced when they must move to the Chelsea Hotel. But the reverberations, the silent sound waves of explosion, knock over his marriage, his relationship with his young son, his satisfaction. On the road to restoring his world, Hans connects with the disadvantaged -- but not through some feel-good community service. Oh no. He joins a cricket league and rekindles his capacity for enjoyment through a boyish pleasure.

The reader feels Hans' world being reconfigured as he socializes with the Dominicans, the Indians, and the Pakis on the bowling green. He shares their rum, forms a friendship with the referee, and is pushed to reclaiming his vigor.

This book celebrates character over plot, theme over pace, and metaphor most of all. It emphasizes the fragility of what life at any moment holds, and the risks that reverberate when the rules are ignored. I wish I knew cricket.

This dark, often pessimistic take on post-9/11 New York is told from the viewpoint of a Dutchman named Hans who has lived in Manhattan for over a decade with his wife. He feels he can claim the City for himself but realizes in the end he will always be known as the Dutch guy. The tragedy effects their marriage and she returns to London with their infant son. He remains in New York for work and becomes engulfed in playing cricket with other displaced non-Americans. This bizarre subculture leads him to befriend a mysterious Trinidadian named Chuck who has huge ideas and dark connections to parts of New York Hans hardly knew existed. Is it the therapeutic escape he needs or is it only another excuse for him to run away from his responsibilities? Netherland is captivating and a fine piece of fiction on the years following a time when one devastating and cowardly event brought together strange bedfellows and tore apart the most secure relationships. ( )

Sometimes it's more about how you say things, than what you say. The strongest feature of Netherland is the dispassionate voice of the narrator Hans van den Broek. The narrator takes you along a detached journey through an emotional time as he re-lives post 9/11 New York City, a separation from his wife and son, psychic exhaustion, and a rebirth through the unlikely avenue of cricket While there is something of a snobbish air to the first half of the novel, and much gratuitous romanticization of New York City, O'Neill captures, in liquid prose, an honest and intimate picture of one man's universe. Quite good. ( )

O'Neill's writing is amazing. A thoroughly enjoyable book. ( )

I saw this book on LT and it was well praised. The blurb on the back about being marooned in a hotel with its strange occupants, sold me. I was expecting something different. What I wasn't expecting was a 9/11 story. I avoid them like the plague. Its too soon to have anything meaningful to say, and frankly I am tired of wallowing in the tragedy. I also was not expecting to get a tome on Cricket, most of which I found extremely boring.

I did not enjoy the book, and mostly couldn't wait for it to end. I gave it 3 stars, but then downgraded to 2.5.

The story is about a European couple (English & Dutch) who move from England to NYC. They arrive before 9/11. They are close enough to Ground Zero that they have to move out of their loft when the attack happens. It is why they are in the odd hotel with the wacky people. It is a residential hotel, so the odd people live there permanently.

On the one hand their reaction enraged me, they didn't think they had to do anything to protect the country. As ordinary citizens, even visitors they can't expect that it is always someone else's responsibility (police, military) so they can live their lives with no responsibilities of their own. The country was good enough for them to avail themselves of all its benefits, but god forbid they might be frightened or inconvenienced, or expected to change. The average person needs to be calm, brave, and carry on with their lives - which is how they can help to protect the country, not hiding under the bed and whining. Of course I am an Army brat and grew up knowing that we would always be on the front line, especially when overseas.

On the other hand I can sympathize with the uncertainty that 9/11 brought. There is a giant high bridge that goes to Charlestown near Boston. I never use it, but once when they were doing construction I ended up on it by mistake. It was dark and late, and the bridge seemed like an upside down U. I felt like I was climbing to the sky. It was just after 9/11, and I didn't expect the bridge to fall or be blown up (though I did think about it), but previously I never would have doubted a massive structure. We don't have quakes or any really destructive weather. So I can sympathize that it must have been very scary to work in a tall building in NYC after the event.

The POV character is the Dutch husband, Hans. He is weak, wishy-washy, and doesn't know what he wants or how to say it. His marriage falls apart after 9/11, and his wife takes their son and returns to England. He can't really identify the problem, so he has no clue what to do about it. Since he is on his own, Hans starts to hang around with the odd characters in the hotel. He also becomes obsessed with his childhood game of Cricket. He ends up befriending an umpire named Chuck, a man from Trinidad who turns out to have criminal tendencies and who comes to a very bad end once Hans returns to the UK.

Unfortunately Hans is not interesting as a character, his wife is vile and the rest of the cast are not very interesting either. They are small sketches, but not really people. They aren't that odd either - except for the Angel, but he gets very little stage time. Chuck seems to be a stereotypical non-white immigrant. The book in fact is filled almost exclusively with non-white immigrants. Perhaps that is what modern NYC is like, but its not my experience as a visitor to the city, though to be fair I don't wander off the tourist track. I think it is just the sphere Hans hangs out in. He or the author has a need to be the only white man in the group ?

Which brings up the other issue about Hans. He is supposed to be Dutch, but in his life he talks and often thinks as though he were actually English. There are Dutch references, but also English that seem to include him in the group. The narrative also jumps around from far past (childhood), near past (college), and then it hops into the future, when Hans and his wife are reconciled and living in the UK. He will say he hardly spent any time with Chuck, but then spend an entire paragraph describing his thoughts, actions, and motivations; Information that could only have been gained by the end of their relationship, but being applied at the start.

There was a lot of minutiae about Cricket from famous players, to grass type, its care, maintenance, and field construction. Then he went on about different batting, and pitching techniques, and Han's childhood memories of the games. We also got the history of Cricket in the US, and descriptions of games and venues. Even if Cricket was a metaphor for life, its massively boring if you aren't into Cricket or if you know nothing about it. Much of it has a lingo of its own and is incomprehensible.

The final problem was the actual writing itself. The sentence structure is so long, and convoluted, it should have drawn jail time. The story jumps forward and backward, and other than Cricket there is no real focus. ( )

How could I not read the novel endorsed by Barack Obama? The narrator of Netherland, Hans van den Broek is a well-to-do financial analyst living in Manhattan in the aftermath of 9/11. When his wife takes his son and flees to London, Hans copes with the loneliness and disorientation by playing cricket and by befriending a Trinidadian "businessman" (read: gangster) named Chuck Ramkisson.

The novel is beautifully written (and the only book I've read in a long time that drove me to the dictionary a few times) but I have to say I admired it more than I enjoyed it. I want to say that the overall effect is more cerebral than emotional, but in fact Hans is av very vulnerable character and there's emotion all over the place. I think I'll need to revisit this later and try to connect with it in a more substantial way. ( )

Though I had hoped it would, this book never quite grabbed me emotionally. Though I enjoyed many passages and portions of the book, in the end I was left slightly dissatisfied. Though not one that understands the sport of cricket (or its appeal), the role it played was one of better features of the book - including the decision to change batting style despite the emotional challenge of doing so. A good book, but I was anticipating great. ( )

Couldn't finish it. It wasn't for me. ( )

Rather contrived, but there are some nice scenes in NYC and about the unravelling of his marriage. Maybe I just didn't believe in the very improbable Dutch protagonist/narrator. The other Dutch details are maybe exotic to English readers, but were a bit too emphatic IMHO. ( )

The best thing about Netherland is the writing style--it is full of beautiful metaphors and pithy observations. But after reading it I was left with the feeling that I missed something, and I wish someone could tie the pieces together for me. O'Neil sets up an expectation that the story will be a parable about crime and ambition a la Great Gatsby, but it ultimately focuses instead on the relationship between the protagonist and his wife, who is absent for the vast majority of the story. This shift of focus at the end makes you question the significance of everything that came before it, and I think a second reading may be required to understand how the main plot connects to the ending. A very interesting read, all in all.

As his marriage disintegrates and his wife and son move back to London, Hans is left in post 9/11 New York City and takes up cricket again to fill his lonely hours. The novel reflects on modern marriage, the role of immigrants in modern American society, and Hans inability to find happiness with his stiff little Dutch self. A pretty good read. ( )

Similar to Paul Auster. Wonderfully complex but told with an equally wonderful lucidity. I found myself having to slow my reading speed down in order to really appreciate the exquisite sentence construction. I do have to say that there was a little lull about two-thirds of the way through, although it picked up pace pretty quickly. ( )

A very skilled but finally unsatisfying novel as O'Neill seems to be working up to some momentous colonial/postcolonial conclusion about history and never gets there. The marriage story rather stifles the second half of the book, bringing it indoors from the cricket pitch and the urban road trips.

This novel won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award and a friend recommended it after a discussion of some of its post-modern qualities. Although well-written, I am not entirely convinced it deserves the accolades showered upon it.

First of all, it flips back and forth between first and third person, much like the narrative flips back and forth between present, future, and past. This book most definitely will require another read, so I can track these changes and see if some narrative justification exists for these shifts.

O'Neill has written a fine, interesting story of a Dutch financial analyst, Hans, who travels with his wife, Rachel, to New York from London. The reason for these job changes does not come out in the early chapters, but only much further along. Had I had this information, my understanding of the events in the "present" would have made more sense, and the "future" events would have been more logical. Because O'Neill jumped around, following the motivations of these characters became a chore.

Also, the early parts of the book -- the prose seems a bit stiff -- possesses a voice different from later parts, which seem more natural, like this passage, when Hans describes an incident from his childhood in the Netherlands:

"The old visual domain was unchanged: a long series of unlit back gardens leading to the almost indiscernible silhouette of dunes. To the north, which was to my right, the Scheveningen lighthouse twinkled for a second, then fell dark, then suddenly produced its beam, a skittish mile of light that became lost somewhere in the blue and black above the dunes. These sand hills had been my idea of wilderness. Pheasants, rabbits, and small birds of prey lived and died there. On escapades with a friend or two, we would urge our twelve-year-old bodies under the barbed wire lining the footpaths and run through the sand-grass into the wooded depths of the dunes." (86)

I got the impression this represented the height of mischief and rebellion for the young boy. This passage also reminds me of young Stephen Daedalus coping with the vagaries of Clongowes in Poratrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The novel contains long paragraphs that seem ever so slightly organized to prevent the conclusion that Hans is day dreaming or we are experiencing his stream of consciousness, I found myself frequently back-tracking to find out where I was.

Despite these drawbacks, I could not bring myself to abandon the story. I cared about Hans, and took his side in the discussions with Rachel. Fortunately, I have a large book of cricket rules, so I could make sense of some of the many references to the sport. However, some deeper connection between life and cricket must lie buried in all this, but I do not know enough about the sport to figure that out. Four stars

--Jim, 7/25/09 ( )