I Loved This Book

Netherland by Joseph O"Neill

It is a story of Hans van den Broek, a European expatriate in New York City. It is a story about cricket. It is a story about a man whose wife has decamped for London where he later reconciles with her. It is a story about Chuck Ramkissoon, a West Indian émigré, dreamer, entrepreneur, and sometime underworld habitué, and so many other New Yorkers who in this book are represented by the residents of the Chelsea Hotel, where Hans lives, and by the cricket teams on which Hans plays. It is a story about the New York City Hans learned by playing cricket, and I have learned as a public librarian – a city that is home to a generation of strivers, both immigrants and expatriate, from the West Indies, South Asia, East Asia and every other part of the world. It is, as Dwight Garner, the reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, said, “the most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.” I loved this book.