Netherland
by Joseph O’ Neill (Harper Perennial)
As John F Kennedy made Ian Fleming a millionaire by confessing to being hooked on James Bond, so Barack Obama, who said “Netherland” when asked what he was reading, has done wonders for sales of the novel.
The plot of Netherland is somewhat closer to real life than the Bond series. But perhaps it’s not real life for its American readers, for Netherland is about cricket, played largely by West Indians in a park on the edge of Staten Island, New York.
In Netherland, Dutch equities analyst Hans van den Broek finds a cricket bat in a taxi; the driver invites him to watch a match. It is post-9/11; Van den Broek’s wife, who can’t handle the tension, has gone back to London with their small son. He joins a team and cricket saves his sanity — which is under some pressure, as he lives in the Chelsea Hotel, where most of the residents are nuts. One young man sports a collection of huge wings; another is known as “the drug dealer on the 10th floor”; and an old woman sits in the lobby all day rummaging in her handbag and murmuring about Luxembourg.
There’s nothing nutty about Trinidadian Chuck Ramkissoon, however, a first-rate operator with big dreams — a cricket ground on the southern tip of Manhattan! A major league of cricket teams! To turn his dream into reality, he must get close to some shady characters. That’s okay with Ramkissoon. Van den Broek watches him, bemused: “Chuck,” he reminisces, “valued craftiness and indirection.
“He found the ordinary run of dealings between people boring and insufficiently advantageous to him at the deep level of strategy at which he liked to operate … He was a wilful, clandestine man who followed his own instincts and analysis and would rarely be influenced by advice.” Watching a street fight from his office window, Ramkissoon, says with a chuckle: “I love it here. Dog eat dog. No holds barred.”
The book is about cricket, about Ramkissoon, who has bought joyously into the American dream that becomes his downfall, and about life in New York on the margins.