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Amazon Sales Rank: 508
Publication Date: 2008-05-20
Release Date: 2008-05-20
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307377040
Type: Hardcover
Number Of Pages: 272
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In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans--a 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, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, 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--by his ability to a hold fast to a sense of American and human possibility in which Hans has come to lose faith.
Netherland gives us 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 21st century America from an outsider’s vantage point, and the complicated relationship between the American dream and the particular dreamers. Most immediately, though, it is the story of one man--of a marriage foundering and recuperating in its mystery and ordinariness, of the shallows and depths of male friendship, of mourning and memory. Joseph O’Neill’s prose, in its conscientiousness and beauty, involves us utterly in the struggle for meaning that governs any single life.
Average Rating: 
Review: 2008-12-01
A significant work
A significant work about an emotionally bleak post-9/11 that is at once invigorating and reflective. The great tragedy of that day is a shadow that falls over the characters and the events, but it wisely never takes over the novel. This is a reasonably suspenseful, well-paced book,even with some rather long-winded explanations of cricket, which I found myself skimming after a while. (O'Neill, is the author of an acclaimed memoir and a member of the Staten Island Cricket Club, and like a reviewer from the Guardian I couldn't help but wonder occasionally if he shouldn't have written a memoir-essay on New York cricket.) The writing is slightly self-aware at times, and some of the undeniably lovely lyric passages don't feel completely credible to the 1st person narrator. Still, many of the psychological aspects are piercingly sharp and the writing is both honest and subtle, although the main character, Hans, is ultimately less interesting, and more thinly-drawn than the novel's foil, Chuck, a Trinidadian self-made (and highly shady) business man who, we learn early on, has been murdered. Quibbles aside, O'Neill is a great observer of the human condition, and his descriptions of the occupants of the Chelsea Hotel alone are worth the effort.
Review: 2008-11-21
Awful
I tried and tried to like this book. It is a book that is written to show off the authors use of the Enlish language. The characters are unlikable. All of them. He even managed to make a colorful guy like Chuck boring. The narrator, yes we understand the Dutch are stereotyped as unemotional, is a zombie and floats through 9/11, separation from his wife and son and the death of his closest friend in NY with no believable reaction. The author claims that Hans is angry, upset and hurt, but the jumble of vocabulary words and drawn out paragraphs that hop back and forth between time and space make you forget that the character is experiencing something and gets you lost in the maze of prose. The descriptions of New York are the most interesting part of this book. I was not aware that cricket was played in Staten Island, but then does there really need to be a 260 page book written just to tell us that?
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Amazon List Price: $23.95
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