Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

Both as narrative and metaphor, the deceptive languor of cricket misses the point and pace of American life. It is the right answer to the wrong question. Yet one New York critic likened Netherland to The Great Gatsby and Manhattan booksellers are relishing the rare joy of seeing a literary novel sell faster than crime.

What is remarkable about the responses is that they are both true and chimerical, as is much that occurs (and doesn't) in this taut tale of domestic and social chaos.

Hans, a Dutch commodities analyst, lives alone in the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife, Rachel, returns to suburban London. Bored, lonely and consumed like the rest of the city with post-9/11 fears, Hans gets mixed up with a motley crew of weekend cricketers, Indo-Pakistani and Caribbean immigrants clinging to a souvenir of home. There are no rolled pitches and the only way to score runs is to hit the ball over the fielders' heads, which goes against everything in Hans's tight, Hollandic outlook.

He grows unhappier as it become clear that Rachel has found someone else, a celebrity chef who does useful things in her kitchen. Without resorting to intimacy of any kind, Hans's leisure time is taken over by Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian of dubious occupation whose dream is to establish a New York cricket club where the world's great masters will come and play.

Much of this is oddly familiar to me.

The Chelsea, where I overnighted last month on a frugal BBC budget, was the hangout of Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan on their last trips to America, an unvarnished bohemian landmark on 23rd Street that combines tourist rooms with residential apartments, one of which is occupied (I'm told) by Joseph O'Neill. Thirty years ago, living further uptown, I played Sunday cricket in Central Park with types very similar to the ones described. Last month, a billionaire Texan financed a speeded-up 20/20 cricket contest that will be aimed partly at US TV audiences.

Netherland's backdrop is beautifully described but the tale is far from linear.

Near the top of the book we discover that Hans and Rachel are reunited and Chuck is found dead in the Hudson River. How, why and in which order is never amplified. The profound originality of O'Neill's novel is the way it tells a story in ellipses, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks. This is not so much his story as ours: the world of economic and relationship uncertainty that we have inhabited since the planes crashed into the Twin Towers and the 7/7 bombs went off on the Tube. This is a tale of our times, troubled and disconnected. Whether it is also the Great American Novel, as some claim, is neither here nor there. All that can be guaranteed is that Netherland, once read, will not be readily forgotten..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal. In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off-kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the powercut and the Iraq war. Those years were difficult for Hans - his English wife Rachel left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and silences in their marriage, and he spent two strange years in the Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents. Lost in a country he'd regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in a most alien place - the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city's most marginal parks. It was during these games that Hans befriended Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreamed of establishing the city's first proper cricket field. Over the course of a summer, Hans grew to share Chuck's dream and Chuck's sense of American possibility - until he began to glimpse the darker meaning of his new friend's activities and ambitions...' Netherland' is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between. It is a novel of a marriage foundering and recuperating, and of the shallows and depths of male friendship. With it, Joseph O'Neill has taken the anxieties and uncertainties of our new century and fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty and brilliance.