Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

So the dirty little secret of the Jacob & Katy book club is that occasionally, we read books that are popular for timely reasons. Most of the time, we go out of our way to pick either unusual or uncommon books. But it doesn't always work out that way. We did Light in August around the same time Oprah picked it, and Infinite Jest right after David Foster Wallace died. Because when is Faulkner ever a bad idea? And if we weren't going to do Infinite Jest then, it never would have happened ("Infinite Summer" would have been waaaaaay out of the question). And this time around, President Obama just happened to endorse Netherland right after Jacob decided he wanted to read it. But despite the urge to ditch the choice as it gained popularity among the bookier Americans, it squeaked onto the short list for this round, and into the finals.

Netherland is a novel by Joseph O'Neill, set mostly in New York shortly after 9/11. Hans, a Dutchman by way of London (where he acquired a wife and a stable career in finance) moves to New York at the insistence of his wife. She freaks out and return to London shortly thereafter with their infant son and Hans's testicles firmly in hand. He flounders around in a sort of bleak comfort--he makes plenty of money at his Wall Street job, but can't really think of a way to spend it, except on an overpriced apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. The only thing that tethers him to--well, anything, really, is his love for cricket. He joins a weekly cricket game in Staten Island, populated by guys from India, the West Indies, and various other former British protectorates. There, he meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a gregarious Trinidadian dude who knows what he wants from life: sex, money, and a world-class cricket stadium in Brooklyn.

While dealing with his various losses (his mother, his sweetly ordinary Dutch childhood, his wife and kid), Hans lets Chuck pull him into his orbit. This involves a lot of random-ish errands out to Brooklyn, where Chuck describes (in increasingly alarming detail) his plans to finance a cricket mecca in East Flatbush. It becomes clear that Chuck is doing some seriously shady stuff to finance his dream: iffy Russian friends, a gambling ring among local West Indians, schmoozing hazy international donors. Hans is both curious enough to go along for the ride, and bored enough to disregard any potential illegality on his own part. He idolizes Chuck a little without sentimentalizing him--both men, as modern immigrants to the country, are seeking the American prize, whatever that might be. For Chuck, it's American capitalism with an extra helping of jingoism. For Hans, it's owning the potential for freedom--his obsession becomes getting a driver's license and buying a car, even though a) no one needs a car in NYC; and 2) he seems to have no plans to go anywhere outside the metro area. But they're both looking for a piece of the action, and appear to respect that in one another. That they both love a sport that 99.9% of the American population couldn't care less about, that's just cake.

As Hans starts pulling his own life together, he starts to have less use for Chuck--and the way O'Neill juxtaposes their trajectories is interesting. In a review blurb, NY Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani suggests that there are "echoes of the Great Gatsby." And I can see that (though my partner in bookish crime begged to differ). There's a similar sense of melancholy over both books, and Chuck is a bit of a Gatsby--the faux-naive, cheerfully sociopathic part, anyway. Both novels are about finding the sacred in American life.

I also really enjoyed O'Neill's writing. At times he's a little too sentimental, but that may have been just a function of his mopey, nostalgic narrator. I liked the complex, streaming language:

"I came to step around in a murk of my own making, and to be drifted away from my native place, and in due course to rely on Rachel as a human flashlight.... To give an example, she was the one, all those years ago, who brought cinema and food to my attention. Undoubtedly I had already watched movies and eaten lunch; but I hadn't located them in the so-called scheme of things."

"I was taken by lightheaded yearning for an interlude of togetherness, a time-out, as it were, during which my still-wife and I might lie together in a Four Seasons suite, say, and work idly through a complimentary fruit basket and fuck at leisure and, most important, have hours-long, disinterested, beans-spilling, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may conversations in which we'd examine each other's unknown nooks and crannies in the best of humor and faith."

"...I began to dream in all seriousness of a stadium, and black and brown and even a few white faces crowded in bleachers, and Chuck and me laughing over drinks in the members' enclosure and waving to people we know, and stiff flags on the pavilion roof, and fresh white sight-screens, and the captains in blazers looking up at a quarter spinning in the air, and a stadium-wide flutter of expectancy as the two umpires walk onto the turf square and its omelette-colored batting track, whereupon, with clouds scrambling in from the west, there is a roar as the cricket stars trot down the pavilion steps onto this impossible field in America, and everything is suddenly clear, and I am at last naturalized."

So popularity aside, this was a book chosen in good taste, and I'm glad to have read it.