Netherland

Joseph O’Neill

Pantheon Books, 2008

It’s a somewhat cynical view of literature indeed to say that it’s all been done before. Of course we will argue (we must!) that this is a silly and overly-pessimistic outlook to take. But it’s true that a lot’s been done, and much of it done well, and it’s an ambitious and self-assured writer who opts to head down those well-trodden literary roads, in effect claiming that there are still new views to be seen along the way.

The dual themes of the immigrant experience in America and the desire to re-connect in a post-9/11 New York City are just such tricky roads. One imagines he’ll encounter the familiar sights and sounds: the musings of characters struggling to redefine themselves in the midst of social or emotional upheaval, the recognizable nostalgia for a personal or public past that can never be fully recovered, the sense of alienation and disorientation in a new indecipherable world.

For this reason, Netherland is a risky venture. But in Joseph O’Neill’s skilled hands, the novel succeeds, not least because of the way in which its memorable characters enliven the ghostly city landscape in the process of navigating it.

Netherland is the story, told retrospectively, of Hans van den Broek, a Dutch-born banker who has moved from London to New York City with his English wife, Rachel, and their young son. When the events of 9/11 force the family out of its comfortable TriBeCa home and into a temporary residence at the quirky Chelsea Hotel, the relative stability that has characterized their transplanted lives thus far begins quickly to unravel. The marriage soon falls apart and Rachel returns to London with their son. Hans, in turn, suddenly finds himself very much alone, marooned in a country he had come to feel at home in. Wearily, he plods through his days without pleasure or energy, musing that “a life seemed like an old story.”

It is in just such a miserable state that Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket—with its largely West Indian participants—and along the way strikes up an unlikely friendship with the Trinidadian expatriate, Chuck Ramkissoon, who volunteers as an umpire of the games.

The talkative and vivacious Chuck quickly takes shape as the other major character of Hans’s story, and it becomes clear that the two men, from very different backgrounds but both immigrants in America, may simply be different sides of the same coin. Chuck is a charismatic entrepreneur-gangster, who makes a living dipping his toes into a wide array of mysterious business involvements, including a gambling operation and his own grand plan to open a world-class cricket stadium in Staten Island. Despite his relative invisibility in mainstream American culture, Chuck dreams large. Yet we read of his plans and plots with the knowledge we’ve gained at the outset of the novel that Chuck is doomed to meet a tragic and grisly end. A dreamer, his dreams are destined never to be realized.

Meanwhile, Hans, a successful transplanted banker of Dutch origin—financially stable and fair in appearance—seems as though he should filter into New York society with little resistance. But infuriating scenes that unfold at a number of government agencies (the DMV, for one) thwart a smooth assimilation; Hans, too, is not exempt from the most trying aspects of the immigrant experience.

Some of the most poignant and intelligent parts of the novel occur in the course of Hans’s troubled musings. What is to become of the dreamer in this post-9/11 world? What is to become of the American dream itself? Hans is a realist in the end, and perhaps this is what saves him, but he is not without an appreciation for the courageous mind that seeks what is just beyond the horizon:

“Who hasn’t known, a little shamefully, the joys [such dreamlike scenarios] bring? I suspect that what keeps us harmless from them is not, as many seem to believe, the maintenance of a strict frontier between the kingdoms of the fanciful and the actual, but the contrary: the permitting of a benign annexation of the latter by the former, so that our daily motions always cast a secondary otherworldly shadow and, at those moments when we feel inclined to turn from the more plausible and hurtful meanings of things, we soothingly find ourselves attached to a companion far-fetched sense of the world and our place in it.”

He continues: “It’s the incompleteness of reverie that brings trouble-that, one might argue, brought Chuck Ramkissoon the worst trouble of all. His head wasn’t sufficiently in the clouds. He had a clear enough view of the gap between where he stood and where he wished to be, and he was determined to find a way across.”
In the end, it is his involvement in cricket, and the relationship he develops with the Gatsby-like Chuck, that enable Hans to recover some sense of himself as he fumbles to regain his footing. Cricket is both a nostalgic experience for him—it recalls his boyhood days of playing the sport in the Hague—and a kind of outlet as well.

But what Hans comes to recognize is that for the immigrant players, cricket is not merely an escape from the difficulties of the real world. It is an alternative version of the world altogether, in which the player could act, take charge, and have a chance at success on American soil. “There are hornier dilemmas a man can face,” he says, “but there was more to batting than the issue of scoring runs. There was the issue of self-measurement. For what was an innings if not a singular opportunity to face down, by dint of effort and skill and self-mastery, the variable world?”

Netherland presents a New York and an America eerily transformed by the events of 9/11, though these events are seldom referenced outright. The landscape of the novel feels darkly surreal, a world traversed by oddball characters, like the cross-dressing angel that inhabits the Chelsea Hotel. It is also a world inhospitable to love.

What I’ve come to find is that the story of the immigrant experience is often a story of questing for the meaning of home, and the complicated role that a home plays in one’s sense of himself. O’Neill’s protagonist, by way of unforeseeable circumstances, comes to inhabit a hotel, where an odd mélange of temporary and semi-permanent residents drift about with no real connection to place. Without wife or child, a nostalgic Hans finds himself plumbing the depths of his memories of a home long ago. Recollections of his mother and his boyhood in Holland provide temporary anchors that eventually help him recover a sense of himself and his place in the world. These memories are a refuge. Perhaps tellingly, it is only when he leaves New York to return to London, reuniting with Rachel and his son, that he becomes whole once again, grounded, re-connected—home.

Thus, with the benefit of hindsight and from the safety felt in the present, Hans’s attention becomes intensely focused on what, or who, had kept him afloat during his dark bachelor years in New York:

“[Chuck] was right; we got caught up in a jam on the BQE beneath Brooklyn Heights. It didn’t matter. The clouds in motion over the harbor had left a pink door ajar and surface portions of Manhattan had prettily caught the light, and it appeared to my gaping eyes as if a girlish island moved toward bright sisterly elements. I was still receptive, apparently, to certain gifts.”