ISBN: 9780007275700

Synopsis In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal. In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off-kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the powercut and the Iraq war. Those years were difficult for Hans—his English wife Rachel left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and silences in their marriage, and he spent two strange years in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents.

Lost in a country he’d regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in a most alien place - the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city’s most marginal parks. It was during these games that Hans befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreamed of establishing the city’s first proper cricket field. Over the course of a summer, Hans grew to share Chuck’s dream and Chuck’s sense of American possibility – until he began to glimpse the darker meaning of his new friend’s activities and ambitions.’Netherland’ is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between.

It is a novel of a marriage foundering and recuperating, and of the shallows and depths of male friendship. With it, Joseph O’Neill has taken the anxieties and uncertainties of our new century and fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty and brilliance.

Bookclub Review Netherland chronicles a strange period in the life of a rather ordinary Dutch man struggling with his personal life in post September 11 New York. The period is shaped not only by his separation from his wife, but also by his growing friendship with the charismatic Trinidadian, Chuck Ramkisson. Chuck and Hans both share a love of cricket, but slowly their relationship moves off the cricket field and into the seedier sides of New York. Years later, after Chuck’s body is mysteriously found in the Hudson River, Hans reflects back on his enigmatic relationship with Chuck.

What the group thought:

Almost all the group thoroughly enjoyed Netherland and rated it very highly for its beautifully crafted prose and dreamy style. However, there were a couple of people who found the book rather weak (“pretentiously written,” “boring and meandering”). Those members who liked the book found the language very evocative, and agreed that O’Neill captured the feel of both The Netherlands and New York very well. Indeed, some felt that the book could almost be described as a travel book, it was so deeply descriptive. The group felt also that the book was perhaps more an exploration of culture than characters, especially given it’s very limited plot. The main character’s narrative was rather hazy, as were descriptions of his wife and family, and indeed, Chuck Ramkissoon. Some of the group felt that O’Neill had failed to adequately sketch all his characters, others that this enigmatic Gatsbyesque quality mirrored the foggy, difficult nature of the main themes of this book: confusion of identity, lack of direction, loss of both personal relationships and self? If nothing else then, this book generated a thought-provoking discussion, which in book group terms is always a good thing. Even taking into consideration a couple of low “1” votes, the overall score from the group was 3.5 out of 5, one of our highest scores ever!