“With echoes of The Great Gatsby,” the cover blurb by Michiko Kakutani goes, “Joseph O’Neill’s stunning new novel provides a resonant meditation on the American Dream.”
If a writer is ever going to bring his quill-as-spade to an urban setting and unearth the American Dream, no doubt each shovelful will be dumped somewhere in the Hudson River. For New York, to those who come to this country from distant shores, represents America. It is where baseball means the Yankees (that coming from a Mets fan), where skyscrapers mean The Empire State and Chrysler buildings, where banking means finance, where money means wealth, and most poignantly, where America means opportunity. New York has the unique power to illuminate, inflate, and clarify, even as the buildings overhead blot out the sun.
Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland” concerns two such men from distant shores. Hans van den Broek is a Carraway-esque dabbler in the New York life, albeit updated for the 21st century. A millionaire, van den Broek is set adrift in his own existential currents after his wife and child return to London. The attacks of September 11 force the couple out of their Tribeca loft and into the Chelsea Hotel, but also jar them apart. Hans is left in New York, his adopted home of just over four years, to turn the broken shards over in his hand and try to understand what went wrong
Hans reveals early on that he eventually makes it back to London and to his wife and child, so his story is not a matter of much suspense. But Hans’ story is one of those alchemical New York stories, of chance made fate. Chance being the moment when Hans picks up cricket, his childhood pastime, and while watching a dispute where an opposing player draws a gun on the umpire. Fate as Hans watches in frozen panic as said umpire calmly dissuades the man from the course of action he’s started on. That umpire is Chuck Ramkisoon. Soon enough their divergent worlds overlap on the wicket (the cricket pitch) and Hans, lonely and desperate, becomes enchanted by the mysterious man.
O’Neill is able to convey an aspect of New York that I’ve never read before but which those of us who live here are familiar with: that there is nothing quite like being alone in a city of eight million. Alone in his rented room at the Chelsea Hotel, staring into the rectangle of space beneath his couch and the floor, Hans can only hope that there are people out there just like him, feeling as lost and inert as he does. He is a quiet, hesitant man, a relativist maybe, or maybe a man who simply has never known the immediate, possessive power of unhinged devotion toward anything. There is the sense, conveyed by the very inhabitants of the hotel of crowds, of other lives pressing in and passing by, of a vibrant world right outside the window that is yet beyond him to locate. Chuck Ramkisoon, however, provides him access, some instruction, and mostly someone who Hans can admire for the quality that he specifically lacks: energy. And whatever other mystery and violence Chuck secrets in his life, Hans is grateful for the man and his endless kinetic machinations.
“Netherland” is a moving story of grief, loss, hope and love. van den Broek’s descent and eventual reuniting with his wife is a gift of Ramkisoon (and therefore a gift of New York and America), whose self-assurance and decisiveness create a clever foil. Chuck is a man who moves–metaphorically and quite literally, by teaching Hans to get his American driver’s license–and provides the comfort and space to allow the hesitant van den Broek to move as well. Movement. Industry. Such things are thought to be the pillars of the American Dream. And after all, what could be more American than a driver’s license?
Particularly beautiful is how O’Neill writes New York City, with all the lurid remembrances of a former lover. The sidewalks rarely overflow with tourists and the streets seem vacant, at worst smeared over with the shine of recent precipitation. Trees are noted on sidewalks and the nostalgic remove of the West Side Highway provides the opportunity to crease a smile as he notices team upon team of cricketers pressed together on one of the narrow spits of green that Manhattan does indeed offer. It does not always remind a New Yorker of the city he wakes up to each morning, but it does whisper across the instrument’s strings the hot breath of moments all of us who live here have at one time or another felt. Maybe these images of Hans’, looking back after everything has already come to pass, are the last gift New York will ever give those who leave it: memories not clogged by complaints of the people and pushing and car horns and overstuffed, overpriced restaurants, but those moments when the city’s tremors rattled our eyes and New York became for an instant the setting for some of life’s more perfect moments.