Joseph O’Neill, the author of two novels (This Is the Life and The Breezes) and a family history (Blood-Dark Track), draws on The Great Gatsby to reimagine the American dream in an era when that vision has lost much of its allure.
The Story: In 2006, Hans van den Broek, a Dutch banker living in London, learns that Chuck Ramkissoon, a former friend, has been killed. The death spurs Hans to recall his years in New York just after 9/11, when, infuriated by his sluggish behavior, his English-born wife and son returned to the safety of London. During those years, despite his monthly visits to London, the alienated Hans wonders where life went so wrong. His outlook changes when he takes up his childhood game of cricket and meets Chuck, an idealistic, if shady, Trinidadian entrepreneur who introduces him to a New York where immigrants and expatriates still believe in the American dream. As Hans narrates his friendship with Chuck, he pans back and forth between his childhood in the Netherlands, his present-day life in London with his reconciled family, and the post-9/11 New York that, through Chuck, offered him a new lease on life.
Pantheon. 256 pages. $23.95. ISBN: 0307377040
New Yorker
"Despite cricket’s seeming irrelevance to America, the game makes his exquisitely written novel Netherland … a large fictional achievement, and one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read. … Netherland has an ideological intricacy, a deep human wisdom, and prose grand enough to dare the comparison [to V. S. Naipaul and F. Scott Fitzgerald]." James Wood
Irish Times
"The unattainable green in Netherland is not the light at the end of a dock [as in The Great Gatsby], but the bright grass of a cricket pitch, and the dream is of cricket as a civilising, cosmopolitan force that will rid the US of its insularity and enable it to build bridges with the immigrant Muslims and Hindus who play the game. … It is a measure of O’Neill’s considerable novelistic gifts that Ramkissoon’s quixotic dream never subsides into bathos, or loses its glamorous allure." Declan Hughes
New York Times
"If some of these passages reverberate with echoes of The Great Gatsby and its vision of New York … the reader can only surmise that they are entirely deliberate, for, like Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, Joseph O’Neill’s stunning new novel, Netherland, provides a resonant meditation on the American Dream. … Like Gatsby, Netherland is narrated by a bystander, an observer, who makes the acquaintance of a flamboyant, larger-than-life dreamer, who will come to signify to him all of America’s possibilities and perils." Michiko Kakutani
NY Times Book Review
"Here’s what Netherland surely is: the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell. … On a macro level, it’s about nearly everything: family, politics, identity." Dwight Garner
Chicago Tribune
"Netherland is a story of equipoise, essentially, and the character of the murdered Chuck Ramkissoon, a shady businessman and cricket fanatic originally from Trinidad, serves as a foil to Hans and his malaise as he meditates on his past." Art Winslow
National Geographic
"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." Don George
Critical Summary
Few novels that reference a classic actually live up to that classic, but critics agreed that Netherland, modeled after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, lives up to Fitzgerald’s archetypal portrayal of the American dream. O’Neill reflects on what Jay Gatsby’s unattainable green light means almost a century later in a New York tarnished by 9/11, a place where cricket-playing immigrants believe in the dream’s elusive promises. Critics called the premise brilliant and thought that the novel’s structure (the story begins in 2006 and then flashes back through 2001, 2002, and 2003) allowed for uniquely deep introspection into family, identity, and a multicultural city. The New York Times Book Review reflected the general critical sentiment: "Netherland is a bit like the wily and ebullient Chuck Ramkissoon. It has more life inside it than 10 very good novels."