Netherland by Joseph O’Neill - review
The Times
June 20, 2008
by Ed Smith
It is hard to know which is stranger – that a great American novel has been written about cricket, or that a great cricket novel should be set in America. But both are true. Netherland, a state-of-the-nation exploration of contemporary America, is ambitious, intelligent and deeply perceptive.
Netherland has already been compared with several famous Great American Novels, but it is closer to J.L.Carr’s A Season in Sinji. Written in 1967, Carr’s story is set in an RAF station in West Africa, where the personal and class tensions inherent in English society are exposed in terms of cricket matches imported and played in a hot and complex land.
Netherland, set among New York’s cricket-playing minorities in the aftermath of 9/11, has much greater scope. Where J.L.Carr is determinedly English, Joseph O’Neill’s fiction is played out on a bigger stage. Netherland is more Indian Premier League than village green – it is, in other words, a very American novel.
Three stories are interwoven. The first, about the narrator Hans’s stop-start relationship with his wife Rachel, is the least interesting. Rachel cannot understand Hans’s reluctance to interpret the early 2000s as a simple Manichean battle between good and evil (think George Bush-level rhetoric, only the opposite argument). Far from persuading Hans or the reader, Rachel emerges as the whining embodiment of narcissistic liberal smugness. The only surprise is that Hans keeps going back for more lectures and betrayals.
The second strand concerns the state of America’s national consciousness. The Dutch-born Hans becomes a desolate observer, unfulfilled professionally and emotionally, the puzzled looker out of the window, bruised and damaged, but drawn into life by a burgeoning obsession with New York cricket and its charismatic proselytiser, the Trinidadian Chuck Ramkissoon.
How does cricket fit in as a metaphor here? Cricket is not, as most Americans imagine, foreign to their national temperament. It was there all along, long before baseball, and cricket clubs existed across America in the 19th century. Just as Manhattan was called New Amsterdam before it was New York, cricket filled American fields decades before baseball’s rules were written.
Why, then, do Americans delight in their inability to understand cricket? Baseball, too, is a complex game, but most Brits grasp it in about five minutes. Yet with cricket in America, you sense an almost wilful blindness, as though to understand cricket implies an almost unpatriotic mindset. Can’t understand anything about all this, they boast – see how far we Americans have come from your class-ridden English anachronisms?
This unhistorical dismissiveness, O’Neill implies, draws from the same well as Bush’s inability to understand vast swaths of the globe, including whole religions and civilisations. How ironic, O’Neill suggests, that America, with its heritage as a cultural melting pot, should adopt so simplistic a foreign policy.
According to Ramkissoon, cricket could broaden America’s closed mind. “The US has not fulfilled its destiny, it’s not fully civilised,” he argues, “until it has embraced the game of cricket.” Chuck is convinced that cricket is like “a crash course in democracy”. In a similar vein, the English historian G.M.Trevelyan once wrote that “If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants their châteaux never would have been burnt.” But Chuck’s chutzpah and vision is darkened by a brutal criminality. As with Gatsby, his personal romance is mirrored by a professional immorality. But just as Nick Carraway admires Gatsby, Hans sees hope, even America’s renewal, in Chuck’s flawed heroism.
The echoes of The Great Gatsby are intentional. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy,” Fitzgerald wrote of the wasteful glamour at the top of America’s jazz age inequalities. “Careless” – not wicked, or stupid, or vain, though they were that, too. “Careless” catches the fatal flaw more deeply.
What central flaw in contemporary America does Netherland expose? Not seeing, not wanting to see, still less to understand; making a virtue of simplistic myths of nationalism; narrowness masquerading as clarity; a loss of moral authority, a failure of hope.
Whether a huge six or a home run – whatever the metaphor of your choice – Netherland comes right out of the middle of the bat.