'Netherland' by Joseph O'Neill
BOOK REVIEW
In a beautifully written but detached story, a New Yorker reconnects with cricket and life in the shadow of 9/11.
THERE'S A poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that torments me. "Turn of the Road" is about a man who has connected with the world only through careful watching. "Creatures trusted him, wandering / Into his open gaze . . . And the caged lions / Stared as if at ungraspable freedom." The man waits in "alien space" watching the world from a hotel room until his heart realizes it has no love and cuts him off, refusing him further communion with anything.
"Netherland" has the same problem as the watcher in the hotel. It's an incredible novel that doesn't work. Author and critic Joseph O'Neill can't write a bad sentence and is incapable of thought that isn't elegant, eloquent and wise. But a perceptive eye isn't enough -- some sort of viscera are necessary, and though O'Neill tells us certain things are important, he never really makes us feel it. Even a story about detachment needs attachment to work.
Hans van den Broek, a Dutch national and equities analyst specializing in oil, lives in a nice flat in TriBeCa and watches his marriage fall apart after 9/11. His English wife doesn't want to expose their young son to an "ideologically diseased" country, so she moves back to England and consoles herself there with an affair and a rhetorical stance. Van den Broek sequesters himself in the Chelsea Hotel, befriending a Turkish man who walks around wearing angels wings and returning to his childhood pastime: cricket.
Enter Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian cricket umpire and self-made entrepreneur. Early in the book, Ramkissoon makes a cricket decision in Van den Broek's favor, and the Dutchman hears an eerie grumble of racism among the mostly dark-skinned players on his team. "It's always the same with these people," says a Pakistani batsman. Suddenly, someone pulls a gun. Ramkissoon disarms the man with words, then gives a rousing speech about America's attitude toward baseball's older cousin: "You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of the cricketer."
(It's true. One of the cricket grounds mentioned is near my house -- it's not classy. It's an ill-kept place that police case for illegal activity. New York's softball and baseball diamonds are beautifully kept, but the cricket grounds I've seen are horrid.) Ramkissoon has an odd wisdom and a host of slightly shady financial shenanigans, while Van den Broek comes at the world with the exquisitely observed detachment of an Oxbridge boy. Ramkissoon "valued craftiness and indirection. He found the ordinary run of dealings between people boring," observes Van den Broek as the Trinidadian takes him on his business rounds. The book presents itself as a sort of growing-up story for adults, maybe "A Separate Peace" for people who've mastered the world without understanding it. But that book's vital connection with reality never arrives here.
