Netherland

I got to pick and host for this month's book club. My choice was "Netherland" by Joseph O'Neill. I made Mediterranean Beet and Yogurt Salad, Pasta with Eggplant and Tomato, and Dimply Plum Cake. The pasta wasn't too exciting, but the beets and the cake were pretty good. As for the book, I was too cheap to shell out $25 for less than 300 pages and the wait list at the library was too long, so I read it over two visits to Barnes & Noble. The protagonist, Hans, is a Dutch analyst for an unnamed i-bank in New York. His wife has just moved with their son back to London, leaving him alone in the Chelsea Hotel where they'd been temporarily living after 9/11. He starts playing cricket on weekends with a group of South Asian and Caribbean immigrants; and befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, a charismatic and slightly sinister small-time-gangster/umpire who dreams of creating an American cricket empire. The book jumps back and forth between Hans's memories of his childhood in the Hague; his loneliness and indecision as he looks back on his relationship with his wife and tries to figure out if and how to patch his family back together again; and his journeys through the bowels of the boroughs with Chuck, which become more and more unsettling as the book progresses.
In a way, this book seemed more realistic than the last book we read, even though that one was nonfiction. I grew up in a suburb where I did see men playing cricket in the park on weekends, and I thought O'Neill did an outstanding job of describing these overlooked communities that are such a vital part of New York without exoticizing them. In a book written from the point of view of Hans's wife he probably would have seemed infuriating. But his empathy, humor, and sheer bewilderment with the strange new world he finds himself in make him a very sympathetic narrator.