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.

Review: Netherland (New York Times) There have been good novels about living in the post-9/11 world (Ian McEwan’s Saturday), pretentious ones (Don DeLillo’s Falling Man) and sentimental ones (Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). But sorting through the pile of so-called 9/11 novels is a sad exercise, one that grows more pointless by the day. They’re all 9/11 novels now. It’s impossible, though, to stop scanning the horizon for something else — the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror. Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland is not that novel. It’s too urbane, too small-boned, too savvy to carry much Dreiserian sweep and swagger. But 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 micro level, it’s about a couple and their young son living in Lower Manhattan when the planes hit, and about the event’s rippling emotional aftermath in their lives. On a macro level, it’s about nearly everything: family, politics, identity. I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn’t know I had. ... (Read the full review.)

Review: Netherland (The New Yorker) I don’t know whether Joseph O’Neill jumped out of his bath in Manhattan shrieking “Eureka!” when he realized that, of all the possible subjects in the world, he had to write a novel about playing cricket in New York City, but he should have. Despite cricket’s seeming irrelevance to America, the game makes his exquisitely written novel “Netherland” (Pantheon; $23.95) a large fictional achievement, and one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read. Cricket, like every sport, is an activity and the dream of an activity, badged with random ideals, aspirations, and memories. It popularly evokes long English summers, newly mown grass, the causeless boredom of childhood. Its combat is so temperate that, more explicitly than other sports, it encodes an ethics (as in the reproving British expression “It’s not cricket”). But cricket in this novel is much more than these associations: it is an immigrant’s imagined community, a game that unites, in a Brooklyn park, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Indians, West Indians, and so on, even as the game’s un-Americanness accentuates their singularity. Most poignantly, for one of the characters in the novel cricket is an American dream, or perhaps a dream of America; this man is convinced that, as he claims, cricket is not an immigrant sport at all but “the first modern team sport in America . . . a bona fide American pastime,” played in New York since the seventeen-seventies. ... (Read the full review.)

annaf	Posted on Mar 19, 2009 2:27 PM
Agreed Definitely a good one. I cried. You really feel for the mother and son too. Not just a "9/11" book.
sfriedman	Posted on Mar 19, 2009 2:15 PM
Wonderful Stirring, emotional, moving portrait of a post-9/11 New York. Really highlights what a melting pot New York is. Also love that they bond over cricket. Excellent read.
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Joseph O’Neill was born in Ireland and raised primarily in Holland. He received a law degree from Cambridge University and worked as a barrister in London. He writes regularly for the Atlantic Monthly and is the author of three novels, Netherland, This Is the Life, and The Breezes, and a family history, Blood-Dark Track, which was a New York Times Notable Book. He lives in New York City.

Interview with Joseph O'Neill (The Atlantic) Q. Quite a few novels cover the same territory as Netherland: New York City during and after 9/11.  Did that make you hesitate at all before choosing this setting for your own novel? A. I already had the beginnings of the story, and then 9/11 happened. It inserted itself into the novel, and in many ways became the book’s subject matter. It felt almost compulsory to write about it. And when I was writing, there was very little written about 9/11.  I think it took most people two or three years to see their way through the smoke and the dust to the point that it became something they could write about. Was I deterred by other writing on the subject? Not really, I have to say. I think Don DeLillo quickly knocked something out, which I didn’t read. One or two other people may have knocked things out. I also sort of feel I’ve reached the stage in my life and career where I can take possession of a current event without looking over my shoulder. It’s not as if the landscape is chock-a-block with terrific writers at the moment, I don’t think. ... (Read the full interview.)

Joseph O'Neill Discusses Netherland with Leonard Lopate on WNYC