Netherland

In her great book, The Family Tree, Carole Cadwalladr used cricket as a metaphor: Life as a game of cricket. That seems about right to me. Intense periods of boredom. Rules you don't quite understand. And a few, very few, moments of pure, unadulterated joy. Well, Joseph O'Neill's book Netherland also uses cricket as a metaphor, but his narrator is a bigger fan than Cadwalladr's is and his cricket is a way for the displaced to find their way in a post-9/11 NYC as foreigners.

No fear, though, you don't need to know a thing about cricket to enjoy this book. If nothing, the book gave me further insight into the bizarrest of games, my knowledge of which had been heretofore informed by school novels by PG Wodehouse and by watching games on the college lawns, as played by the Pakistani, Indian, and lone British student..

O'Neill's Hans van den Broek is already used to being out of place when we meet him. He is a Dutch finance wizard and has followed his British wife via London to NYC where they have a baby and then their world falls apart when the towers go down (mercifully, this happens off-page). His wife uses this disaster to decamp to her parents, young child in tow, so that she doesn't have to explain that their marriage had already become a sham of sorts.

Hans stays behind and wanders NYC, even more of an outsider now that he is unmoored from both his apartment and his family. He seeks solace in the Staten Island Cricket club and falls in with the taxi drivers, entrepreneurs, and financiers that make up the club. He sees the white uniforms gathered on a crumby, non-regulation pitch as a metaphor for these collected foreigners of different nations trying to make order of their lives in the new world. He himself has to learn "american cricket" (which apparently requires more aggressive pitching, for example). He spends his days making insane amounts of money at his job, his nights roaming the somewhat suspect areas of NYC, and his weekends playing cricket. It is through cricket that he meets the shady but captivating Chuck Ramkissoon, and it is through Chuck that Hans eventually finds a way out of his shell and into the world. He comes to care about what is happening around him and to, at last, engage in the world, even if he never quite fits into it.

We're supposed to see Hans as disengaged throughout the book, as exemplified by his outsider status as well as by his slowly receding marriage, but mainly I saw Hans as a thoughtful, open-minded character and I thought his wife was extremely annoying and unthoughtful. I thought O'Neill brought a very nice eye and ear to the "unknown" NYC and I enjoyed seeing the city through different characters than the usual.

This book first came to my attention when a friend of mine told me President Obama read it and said it gave him insight into the immigrant experience in this country. And sure enough, there's a quote from him on a sticker affixed to my paperback copy. I hope, if nothing else, the president took some notes on the frustrating and amusing trials of poor Hans trying to get his license at the DMV. We may not be able to welcome all to this country, but maybe we can get everyone driving, even if their names are spelled differently on their two pieces of identification.

I really liked Netherland and felt the whole time that I was meant to learn something about how we move in the world, both in our own spheres and how to shift into the sphere of 'the other'. O'Neill writes perceptively, and intelligently. This is not a quick read, but one to be savored and pondered.