Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

Somebody – my friend Kathy I am almost certain – recommended this book to me. As I was reading it I thought, ‘This man writes like John Banville.’ On the back cover, afterwards, a reviewer describes ‘prose of Banvillean grace’. Aha! Vindicated!

This isn’t a book for people who want story. Having said that, of course it’s got story: a rather endearingly distant, solitary Dutch banker, Hans, and his wife go to live in Manhattan just before 9/11; after the terror, she leaves him and returns home to England with their child, a separation that lasts for a couple of years with him travelling home regularly to see the child, while she works out whether she wants to be with him or not. Eventually he moves back to London and they manage to reunite. Underneath all that is the story of the relationship he has with a man called Chuck in the two years he is living alone in New York. Hans meets Chuck through his interest in cricket – he joins a West Indian team to fill in his solitary hours. Chuck is a Trinidadian who wants to build a cricket stadium in the US, but he’s also a bit of a dreamer, a bit of a gangster, a bit of a mystery. Information about Chuck is patchy, as in all real life relationships – Hans doesn’t have the benefit of the novelist’s omnipotent eye. It’s a sometimes tender relationship, sometimes ambivalent, which is of course how authentic relationships work.

But we know the plot from the beginning so the book isn’t about that. It’s about the internal life of Hans, the fluctuations in relationships that are so hard to identify with their unspoken understandings, their miscommunications, their lies, their poignant moments, the way one small action can change the course of your mood. On the larger scale it’s about post 9/11 and the impact it’s had on New Yorkers as individuals. There are some unforgettable images in this novel – one of a child in a row boat on the water under the stars at night, afloat in the universe; one hysterical moment where a cop pulls a gun on an inflatable Ronald McDonald that is threatening to escape its handlers; a time where the wife says she feels she would like to stay in the marriage because she feels a responsibility to see her husband through his life. Much of the man’s internal dialogue really resonates.

There’s a kind of melancholy running through it that I associate with modern day America. It’s highly critical of American foreign policy and culture, it’s angry and at times desolate. Netherland is an intelligent and witty book, beautiful reading for someone with the time and patience to spend on absorbing every phrase. 4 stars