Netherland

Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day. (63)

Books as portraits of New York City have always drawn me in. Even before I had ever been to New York, reading about it always seemed a curiosity. Netherland by Joseph O’Neill is one beautiful sketch of the immigrant dreamers of America in the midst of post-9/11 New York—both the displaced and dreaming immigrants and the displaced and drifting ones.

My life had shrunk to very small proportions—too small, certainly, for New York’s pickier and more plausible agents of sympathy. To put it another way: I was, to anyone who could be bothered to pay attention, noticeably lost. (72)

Perhaps the relevant truth—and it’s one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I’m sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me—is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble. (64)

There is an irony to the friendship that is in the heart of this novel—the odd friendship between the drifter and the dreamer—as if it were necessary. Consider the boldness of Chuck Ramkissoon the dreamer in contrast to the drifting narrator Hans van den Broek’s previous thoughts.

“We’re the romantic sex, you know,” he said, fighting a burp. “Men. We’re interested in passion, glory. Women,” Chuck declared with a finger in the air, “are responsible for the survival of the world; men are responsible for its glories.” (207)

They share nothing in common but for cricket. It’s what brings them together. The love of it and the passion for it.

We sat mostly silently in the van, absorbed into the moodiness that afflicts competitors as they contemplate, or try to put out of their minds, the drama that awaits. What we talked about, when we did talk, was cricket. There was nothing else to discuss. The rest of our lives—jobs, children, wives, worries—peeled away, leaving only this fateful sporting fruit. (48)

Now cricket, as a New York subculture, is the medium but it isn’t the point, so don’t be discouraged by comments about this book being boring and pointless because all it talks about is cricket. It is much like whaling and Moby-Dick. It’s more about what the sport represents and what the memory of it elicits than the sport itself.

Cricket moves Hans along from his childhood to the present where, amidst a crumbling marriage and a city traumatized by tragedy, it becomes his only tie to truth and home and self. In turn, his friendship with Chuck saw him through his lost, floating years.

I am too tired to explain that I don’t agree—to say that, however much of a disappointment Chuck may have been at the end, there were many earlier moments when this was not the case and that I see no good reason why his best self-manifestations should not be the basis of one’s final judgment. We all disappoint, eventually. (249)

One of the other displaced characters in the novel is the Chelsea Hotel neighbour, a man always dressed up as an angel, in a wedding dress with “tattered white wings” attached to it. This man is quite the memorable figure. He creeps into the story only a couple of times or so but I find his presence striking. The sort-of-in-between, lost but a little hopeful, both a drifter and a sometime dreamer, although, in fact, he is exaggeratedly more lost than Hans ever was or will be. He is the complete contrast to Chuck. His short episodes in the story really quite sad but also glimmery.

Once I had overcome the thought that midway through my life the only companionship I could count on was that of a person who, as he put it, could no longer bear the masculine details of his life, I grew to mildly enjoy the angel’s unexpectedly serene company. He and I and the murmuring widow in the baseball cap sat in a row like three crazy old sisters who have long ago run out of things to say to one another. (37)

O’Neill writes so deftly and precisely and so gracefully. His voice is distinctly brilliant yet absolutely understated. Just beautiful. I didn’t expect to love this book as much as I do. The plot is simple but it never misleads you into thinking there’s something more where there’s none, as many other books do.

A life seemed like an old story. (109)

I only have to look at New York forests to begin to feel lost in them. (59)