The acclaimed literary novel that President Obama read to get away from his briefing books.

One of this year’s most acclaimed novels, Netherland provides both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger and brilliantly achieved ambition: the grand strangeness and fading promise of twenty-first-century America from an outsider’s vantage point, and the complicated relationship between the American dream and its dreamers.

In post-9/11 New York City, Hans—a successful banker originally from the Netherlands—finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, exiled from home, family, and even himself, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant immigrant subculture of cricket (a boyhood passion of his) in New York’s outer boroughs. He is befriended by a charismatic Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, an entrepreneur-gangster with a grandiose plan to turn an unattended patch of park near JFK airport into an international cricket mecca. Chuck introduces Hans to an “other” New York, populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality. Hans is alternately seduced and instructed by Chuck’s particular brand of naivete and chutzpah, and his ability to hold fast to a sense of American and human possibility in which Hans has come to lose faith. What follows is an awakening of sorts for Hans—a chance for the recovery of a lost self—and a less fortunate outcome for Chuck.

Joseph O’Neill—born in Ireland, raised primarily in Holland, and now living in New York—is a keenly perceptive writer who deftly plays with the nature of time and memory and identity. In the Washington Post, Siri Hustvedt wrote: “O’Neill’s prose, in its conscientiousness and beauty, involves us utterly in the struggle for meaning that governs any single life.”

If that isn’t enough to persuade you to pick up this novel, consider this: President Obama, when asked in an April interview with the New York Times magazine whether he was reading “anything good,” responded that he’d grown so sick of his briefing books that in the evenings he was reading a novel–Netherland.

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To learn more about Netherland click here (includes reviews, author interview, and more).

Questions for Discussion

1. Describe the structure of Netherland. Why does the author open with Hans moving to New York City and then quickly jump into the future with Chuck’s death and then jump back? Do you think these flashbacks and foward leaps relate to the narrative arc of the story? Is this simply how we tell stories? When you tell a story do you tell it chronologically? Why?

2. Childhood often slips into the story–that of both Hans and Chuck. Early on in the novel, Hans mentions that he doesn’t connect to himself as a child (”I, however, seem given to self-estrangement”), then proceeds to produce numerous memories of his childhood and of his mother. How is this reconnecting with his heritage and his past important to the story? How is Chuck often the catalyst for these memories?

3. Chuck is more connected to his heritage than Hans. He socializes with others from the West Indies; he’s married to a woman from his birth country, et cetera. How do flashbacks to his childhood differ from Hans’s and how do they affect the novel as a whole?

4. How does nostalgis play into Netherland? Who is nostalgic and for what? Why does O’Neill open the novel with someone being nostalgic for New York City?

5. Discuss the title. What does “netherland” mean and what do you think it refers to?

6. Chuck’s motto is “Think fantastic.” How does this both help and hinder him? Can you create an appropriate motto for Hans? How about for yourself?

7. What does the United States represent for Hans and Chuck? How are their relationships with their new country similar, and also polar opposites?

8. How are both Han’s and Chuck’s experiences typical of American dream of immigrant stories? Compare Netherland to other stories of the immigrant experience (The Joy Luck Club,The House on Mango Street, House of Sand and Fog) or to what you imagine immigrating to a new country to be like.

9. Is the American Dream the same after 9/11? How are Americans both united and divided after 9/11? How is the world of Netherland particular to the United States after 9/11?

10. Describe the narrator’s voice. Do you trust and like Hans as a narrator? Do you sympatize with him and understand his motives? Do you identify with him?

11. Describe the Chelsea Hotel when Hans lives. How is it a character in the novel? How are the various inhabitants and the oddness of the place appealing and comforting to Hans?

12. What is Han’s relationship with his mother? How does the relationship continue to affect him after his mother’s death? How does it affect his being a father?

13. Discuss the theme of male friendship in the novel and its connection to sports. Early in the novel, Hans describes playing cricket with Chuck: “The rest of our lives–jobs, children, wives, worries–peeled away, leaving only this fateful sporting fruit.” While Hans’s friendship with Chuck goes beyond cricket, the sport is what initially brings the two men together. Why do you think cricket is so important to Hans? How does his friendship with Chuck change him?

14. Netherland is also the story of a marriage. Why is Hans and Rachel’s marriage falling apart? What brings them together again in the end?

15. Discuss the theme of betrayal and forgiveness in Netherland. How do both Rachel and Hans betray eachother and why? What about Chuck? Do the characters ever lead themselves astray and betray themselves. Does America betray both Chuck and Hans in the end?

Created by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House.