Netherland

(by Joseph O’Neill)

Very close to the start of this book, the narrator gets a phone call in which he learns that someone he was friends with when he lived in New York is dead: and not just dead, but a murder victim. This is 2006, and the narrator, Hans, is back in London and back with his wife, after a New York interlude in which post-9/11 anxieties exacerbated tension in their marriage and precipitated a temporary split. The narrative jumps back to when Hans first met his now-dead friend, Chuck—during a dramatic cricket game in August 2002 in which Chuck was one of the umpires. And the book continues to jump around in time and place: we see Hans in New York and in London and as a teenager in the Hague; we see Hans playing cricket and driving around Brooklyn with Chuck. Hans is often adrift, and not just in his marriage; Chuck is full of big plans that he’s working to realize, and the contrast in their personalities is part of the story, and part of their friendship. But this is more Hans’s story than Chuck’s, even if the news of Chuck’s death is what gets the book started.

There are so many gorgeous sentences in this book, and I really loved New York as setting, as a place for set pieces: Hans experiences the 2003 blackout (which I missed because I was in Cambridge, MA for the summer that year) and tries and fails to meet up with Chuck at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and has a comically awful experience at the DMV. Hans rides the Staten Island Ferry and goes to Floyd Bennett Field with Chuck (because Chuck wants to build a cricket arena there); Chuck takes Hans to Green-Wood Cemetery and shows him the parakeets living by the entrance. Before Hans moves to New York, he has a conversation with someone at the bank where he works who had his own expat New York interlude, and what the guy says to Hans is that “New York’s a very hard place to leave,” and a lot of the book is about the city’s magic and magnetism, even as Hans later reflects that New York was the place where he’d “been unhappy for the first time” in his life. That melancholy, though, leads to passages like this, which I love: “Directly to the north of the hotel, a succession of cross streets glowed as if each held a dawn. The taillights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit storefronts, the orange fuzz of the street lanterns: all this garbage of light had been refined into a radiant atmosphere that rested in a low silver heap over Midtown and introduced to my mind the mad thought that the final twilight was upon New York.” I also love certain phrases, like when Hans is on a train and a freight train passes: “Blocks of color stormed my window for a full minute.” Or when Hans describes the “suddenly green, almost undersea atmosphere” of a summer thunderstorm.