Perfect Pitch

~ Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill ~

Although I was born and brought up in a cricket-mad country and have been surrounded by cricket-o-philes for much of my life, I have no particular interest in the sport and can name only a small handful of famous cricketers. But in Netherland, I find cricket fascinating. O’Neill’s writing is lovely and precise without being in the least bit over-the-top:

Coming to America, [] I’d eagerly taken on new customs and mannerisms at the expense of old ones. How little, in the fluidities of my new country, I missed the ancient clotted continent. But self-transformation has its limits; and my limit was reached in the peculiar matter of batting. I would stubbornly continue to bat as I always had, even if it meant the end of making runs

In case you’re wondering why this character might have changed his batting style, he was now playing in small, temporary NYC fields with long grass and weeds, so that it was better to loft the ball rather than have it roll along the undergrowth where it would inevitably stop.

Netherland is set in the early years after 9/11, and moves back and forth in time. In 2002, the narrator, Hans, lives in a hotel in NYC; his wife and child have moved back to England, unable to get over the horror of 9/11 and fiercely opposed to the ‘ideologically diseased’ Iraq war and American politics. Hans meets Chuck Ramkissoon at a cricket game on Staten Island, during a

barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows cast by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe, yearn even for those days when you play cricket wearing two sweaters under a cold sky patched here and there by a blue tatter.

Hans is an economic analyst at a bank, with countries and choices accessible to him because of his wealth and ethnic origin. Chuck, in contrast, is a dark-skinned immigrant who arrived in America with very little and is determined to make it big; he has his fingers in all sorts of businesses, the most ambitious of which is a cricket arena to host the as-yet-nonexistent New York City Cricket Club, for which he needs investors like Hans. And yet, of the two Hans seems the needier, lonely and shaken, unable to socialize with his fellow analysts, spending his evenings sitting blankly in his hotel lobby.

The book is a love letter to New York:

Now that I, too, have left that city, I find it hard to rid myself of the feeling that life carries a taint of aftermath. 

It is full of charming sidenotes:

‘once, chasing a ball, I nearly tripped over a hidden, and to cricketers, ominous duck‘.

and is a wonderfully NYC-appropriate ode to multiculturalism. Hans is of Dutch origin, his wife Rachel is English, and the cricket team consists of people from Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The vibrant ethnic subcultures of the city are integral to the story.

This is a novel to be savoured. Almost every sentence is worth turning over, gently unpacking, and admiring for its delicate nuance. This is not to suggest that it is placid; the time period and location alone guarantees intensity. There are layers of metaphor, most of which passed me by on the first reading. There is the occasional dull sidebar — I never got interested in Hans’ fellow hotel residents — and in the first few pages you find out what happens to Hans and Rachel and Chuck, but I read on simply to enjoy the journey.

Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. Pantheon, 2008