Book of the Month: Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill

Sitting in a San Francisco suburb thinking of New York City, I imagine a place roughly defined by Central Park South, Seventh Avenue, 23rd Street, and Park Avenue—the New York of museums, magazine offices, bistros, and bars that I inhabit when I visit. But as Joseph O'Neill's lovely, elegiac new novel, Netherland, reminds us, there are scores of New Yorks—some defined by geography and others by what we might call psychography. O'Neill shines his illuminating narrative on one of these rarely seen sub-cities—a place of expatriates from the Indian subcontinent and the West Indies bound by a passion for cricket.

Our entrée to this exotic New York is provided by the novel's transplanted Dutch protagonist, Hans van den Broek, a 30-something banker who specializes in analyzing oil and gas stocks. Displaced after 9/11 and adrift as his marriage begins to unwind, Hans takes up his childhood sport of cricket after an accidental encounter with a charismatic Trinidadian entrepreneur named Chuck Ramkissoon.

This is the narrative impetus of O'Neill's novel, but the power and poignancy of this remarkable book derive from his textured prose and his tender, nuanced recreations of places present and remembered: the Hague of his childhood, the London of his early married years, and especially the New York of his unmoored expat odyssey. Through Hans we encounter a New York of cabdrivers, cooks, and back-alley businessmen, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs, speaking in the tongues of Guyana, Jamaica, Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka, and meeting to play cricket in Idlewild Park, Monroe Cohen Ballfield, and Randolph Walker Park—home of the Staten Island Cricket Club, founded in 1872.

Interwoven with this New York are other strands, other cities—the New Netherland of 17th-century Dutch immigrants, the Chelsea Hotel's assemblage of misfits, the Midtown oil analyst's 21st-century cabal. O'Neill's evocation of these amalgamated New Yorks offers a fresh appreciation of the metropolis and the American ideal it embodies.