Reading a great novel can be the best and worst experience. Best because it is inordinately satisfying to see a new world blossom in your mind, but also the worst because it can only last a finite amount of time until you turn the final page. Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is that kind of novel. I raced through the first half but crawled through the second, in a desperate attempt to delay the inevitable and luxuriate in this man's prose.This book was written in 2008, so my recommendation is fairly late. However, great art transcends time, and if this book was good enough for my boss to recommend it to me nine years after its publication, it's good enough for me to recommend to you now. It's hard to describe, and when I first read the New York Times Book Review blurb of this being the "most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell," I thought this was going to be a complete slog. But then I read that part of the plot involved immigrants playing cricket in New York. And that was all I needed to dive right in.
There's not much plot to discuss: it's about a Dutchman named Hans van den Broek and his family who used to live in London but then moved to New York and witnessed 9/11. That event throws their life into some upheaval, but it's ultimately more of a plot device and not the point of the story at all. Instead, this is largely a story about New York (and a little bit about London), and immigrants and the stumbling way they cobble together their childhoods and ambitions to find a way to belong to their new countries. It's a series of anecdotes about how everyday life steadily goes on no matter what apocalyptic world events have transpired. And it contains multiple moments that I personally experienced in New York (I moved here the month after 9/11) and describes them in such spectacular detail that I am almost jealous I didn't think to write about them first.
The greatest novels in the world are the ones that feel as though they are telling your own personal story even though they were written by a complete stranger. I love fantasy literature and escapist fare, but a book where I can say "That happened to me!" is a wondrous thing. Netherland hits all the sweet spots for me: it is set in New York, and the whole sequence about Hans applying for his driver's license at the Herald Square DMV took me back nine years to when I applied for my permit and when through the same endless bureaucratic rigamarole. His driver's test was like mine (I passed on the first try though, natch). The description of the NYC summer blackout was spot-on, with the initial fears that people would riot and then the eventual emergence of total civic responsibility. He describes how the skyscrapers "were the most beautiful sight, never more so than on those nights when my taxi from JFK crested on the expressway above Long Island City, and Manhattan was squarely revealed," a sentiment that my parents and I express on every occasion when we return home from the airport.
And O'Neill's eloquent descriptions of cricket almost made me want to weep. I cannot pretend to be any kind of expert on the game, but I played it all the time as a child and watched games with my father, and when we played catch, the highest praise he could give me was to say I had caught a ball like Jonty Rhodes, my favorite South African fielder. All the players that are mentioned in the book are the ones I grew up with, and the fact that Donald Bradman once played at the Staten Island Cricket Club makes me want to sign up to be a player immediately. Reading about sweep shots and the difficulty of predicting a wicket and changing fielding positions when a new batsman is up and the sheer joy of listening to cricket commentary is my idea of poetry.
But obviously your story is not my story. Maybe you don't live in New York or London. Maybe you've never heard of cricket. Maybe you don't care about the West Indian or South Asian diaspora. Maybe you've lived in one small town in the middle of nowhere all your life and none of the above holds any appeal to you. But to that I say, read Netherland anyway. Because I have only described the elements of it that spoke to my personal experience. Yet, it contains multitudes, and while you might not relate to anything I've deemed as my personal highlights, you will find something within these pages that speaks to you. Maybe it's the story of Hans's marriage, maybe it's working in the financial industry (another parallel to my life! Also, did I mention that one of my father's good friends was a Dutch man named Hans? Seriously, this book is my life.) or maybe it will be the simple fact that it is written with vivid wit and empathy. But I leave you with my favorite quote from the book, the one that ensures its placement in my Top 10 favorite novels of all time:
"There's a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket."
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