Netherland [Broché]

Starred Review. Hans van den Broek, the Dutch-born narrator of O'Neill's dense, intelligent novel, observes of his friend, Chuck Ramkissoon, a self-mythologizing entrepreneur-gangster, that he never quite believed that people would sooner not have their understanding of the world blown up, even by Chuck Ramkissoon. The image of one's understanding of the world being blown up is poignant—this is Hans's fate after 9/11. He and wife Rachel abandon their downtown loft, and, soon, Rachel leaves him behind at their temporary residence, the Chelsea Hotel, taking their son, Jake, back to London. Hans, an equities analyst, is at loose ends without Rachel, and in the two years he remains Rachel-less in New York City, he gets swept up by Chuck, a Trinidadian expatriate Hans meets at a cricket match. Chuck's dream is to build a cricket stadium in Brooklyn; in the meantime, he operates as a factotum for a Russian gangster. The unlikely (and doomed from the novel's outset) friendship rises and falls in tandem with Hans's marriage, which falls and then, gradually, rises again. O'Neill (This Is the Life) offers an outsider's view of New York bursting with wisdom, authenticity and a sobering jolt of realism. (May)
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Reviewed by Siri Hustvedt

In Joseph O'Neill's third novel, Netherland, there are two great love objects: the city of New York and the game of cricket. Hans van den Broek, the novel's Dutch narrator, seeks solace in both the place and the sport after September 11, 2001, when he finds himself adrift in the city. We know he watched the destruction on television in the midtown office where he works, that the trauma that followed is the ostensible reason for his foundering marriage, and that the catastrophe forced him, his wife, Rachel, and young son, Jake, out of their Tribeca loft and into the Hotel Chelsea. When Rachel leaves for London with Jake, Hans slides into a state of depressed alienation, which is relieved, in part, by playing cricket in the city's outer boroughs with like-minded comrades from the West Indies and Asia.

On one of these excursions, Hans meets a Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon. This hyper-articulate, bamboozling entrepreneur with a grand dream of building an American cricket arena holds a steady if rather vague fascination for Hans, and the two fall into an unlikely friendship.

From early in the novel, we know that Hans is reunited with his wife and son in London and that Ramkissoon's body has been fished out of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Netherland doesn't turn on plot. In both form and content, it questions the idea that a life can be told as a coherent story. It is organized not chronologically but as a series of memories linked by associations. For example, Hans remembers a day during his last cricket-playing summer in the city:

"This time Chuck drove. It was a fine day. The East River from the Brooklyn Bridge was a pure stroke of blue.

"I thought of my mother, whom I thought of whenever I crossed that bridge.

"Two weeks after Jake was born, she made her first and last visit to America."

Hans goes on to recall bicycling with his mother to Brooklyn, a memory that summons his boyhood in The Hague delivering papers, his mother filling in for him on the route and meeting her "gentleman friend," Jeroen, which then evokes an encounter with Jeroen after his mother's cremation, upon which Hans returns to Chuck, who is still at the wheel and headed for Green-Wood Cemetery.

Through the voices of his characters, O'Neill articulates the problem of a narrative self. Is there really a unified self that moves through time or are we fragmented beings yoked together by a story we tell ourselves? "Some people have no difficulty in identifying with their younger incarnations," says Hans. "I, however, seem given to self-estrangement. I find it hard to muster oneness with those former selves whose accidents and endeavors have shaped who I am now." Rachel, on the other hand, questions "the whole story" of her marriage to Hans. And Eliza, Chuck's mistress, who makes a living putting photographs in order for clients, explains her job with the sentence, "People want a story." But even after the rift with his wife has been repaired, the hero confesses, "Rachel saw our reunion as a continuation. I felt differently: that she and I had gone our separate ways and subsequently had fallen for third parties to whom, fortuitously, we were already married."

The rendering of the narrator's domestic problems and their happy resolution is far less compelling than the intensely observed descriptions of the "nether regions" of the boroughs and the cricket played in them by immigrants. On the field Hans discovers a "continuum of heat and greenness." After the massive destruction of 9/11, the game and its repetitions bring him a sense of order and justice. Cricket, after all, is the same game he played in his childhood as his mother sat and watched him. It has the same rules and the same equipment, and he is playing it in a wounded, but still spectacular New York, a place upon which O'Neill lavishes his narrator's most intense memories and his own elegant prose. It is spring in Chelsea, and Hans, like the city, is stirring to life:

"The blind people were now ubiquitous. Muscular gay strollers were abroad in numbers, and the women of New York, saluting taxis in the middle of the street, reacquired their air of intelligent libidinousness. Vagrants were free to leave their shelters and, tugging shopping trolleys loaded with junk -- including, in the case of one symbolically minded old boy, a battered door -- to camp out on warmed concrete."

At times, the novel's exacting descriptions felt less like a man's memory than a tour of his consciousness, and I wondered why a particular scene merited such detail, but Hans is a person who has lost his bearings after a shock and his myriad perceptions bear the stamp of this estrangement. Always sensitive and intelligent, Netherland tells the fragmented story of a man in exile -- from home, family and, most poignantly, from himself.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Siri Hustvedt In Joseph O'Neill's third novel, Netherland, there are two great love objects: the city of New York and the game of cricket. Hans van den Broek, the novel's Dutch narrator, seeks solace in both the place and the sport after September 11, 2001, when he finds himself adrift in the city. We know he watched the destruction on television in the midtown office where he works, that the trauma that followed is the ostensible reason for his foundering marriage, and that the catastrophe forced him, his wife, Rachel, and young son, Jake, out of their Tribeca loft and into the Hotel Chelsea. When Rachel leaves for London with Jake, Hans slides into a state of depressed alienation, which is relieved, in part, by playing cricket in the city's outer boroughs with like-minded comrades from the West Indies and Asia. On one of these excursions, Hans meets a Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon. This hyper-articulate, bamboozling entrepreneur with a grand dream of building an American cricket arena holds a steady if rather vague fascination for Hans, and the two fall into an unlikely friendship. From early in the novel, we know that Hans is reunited with his wife and son in London and that Ramkissoon's body has been fished out of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Netherland doesn't turn on plot. In both form and content, it questions the idea that a life can be told as a coherent story. It is organized not chronologically but as a series of memories linked by associations. For example, Hans remembers a day during his last cricket-playing summer in the city: "This time Chuck drove. It was a fine day. The East River from the Brooklyn Bridge was a pure stroke of blue."I thought of my mother, whom I thought of whenever I crossed that bridge."Two weeks after Jake was born, she made her first and last visit to America."Hans goes on to recall bicycling with his mother to Brooklyn, a memory that summons his boyhood in The Hague delivering papers, his mother filling in for him on the route and meeting her "gentleman friend," Jeroen, which then evokes an encounter with Jeroen after his mother's cremation, upon which Hans returns to Chuck, who is still at the wheel and headed for Green-Wood Cemetery. Through the voices of his characters, O'Neill articulates the problem of a narrative self. Is there really a unified self that moves through time or are we fragmented beings yoked together by a story we tell ourselves? "Some people have no difficulty in identifying with their younger incarnations," says Hans. "I, however, seem given to self-estrangement. I find it hard to muster oneness with those former selves whose accidents and endeavors have shaped who I am now." Rachel, on the other hand, questions "the whole story" of her marriage to Hans. And Eliza, Chuck's mistress, who makes a living putting photographs in order for clients, explains her job with the sentence, "People want a story." But even after the rift with his wife has been repaired, the hero confesses, "Rachel saw our reunion as a continuation. I felt differently: that she and I had gone our separate ways and subsequently had fallen for third parties to whom, fortuitously, we were already married."The rendering of the narrator's domestic problems and their happy resolution is far less compelling than the intensely observed descriptions of the "nether regions" of the boroughs and the cricket played in them by immigrants. On the field Hans discovers a "continuum of heat and greenness." After the massive destruction of 9/11, the game and its repetitions bring him a sense of order and justice. Cricket, after all, is the same game he played in his childhood as his mother sat and watched him. It has the same rules and the same equipment, and he is playing it in a wounded, but still spectacular New York, a place upon which O'Neill lavishes his narrator's most intense memories and his own elegant prose. It is spring in Chelsea, and Hans, like the city, is stirring to life: "The blind people were now ubiquitous. Muscular gay strollers were abroad in numbers, and the women of New York, saluting taxis in the middle of the street, reacquired their air of intelligent libidinousness. Vagrants were free to leave their shelters and, tugging shopping trolleys loaded with junk -- including, in the case of one symbolically minded old boy, a battered door -- to camp out on warmed concrete." At times, the novel's exacting descriptions felt less like a man's memory than a tour of his consciousness, and I wondered why a particular scene merited such detail, but Hans is a person who has lost his bearings after a shock and his myriad perceptions bear the stamp of this estrangement. Always sensitive and intelligent, Netherland tells the fragmented story of a man in exile -- from home, family and, most poignantly, from himself.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Hans et Rachel vivent à New York avec leur jeune fils lorsque surviennent les attentats du 11 Septembre. Quelques jours plus tard, ils se séparent, et Hans se retrouve seul, perdu dans Manhattan, où il ne se sent plus chez lui. Il fait la connaissance de Chuck, un homme d'affaires survolté qui rêve de lancer le cricket à New York. Sur des terrains de fortune, Hans tente d'échapper à la mélancolie. Le charisme de Chuck draine une foule de joueurs du dimanche, tous venus d'ailleurs - de Trinidad, de Guyane ou de plus loin encore -, tous persuadés que l'Amérique reste le pays des possibles. Alors que le monde ne croit plus en rien, eux continuent d'espérer. Au milieu de ces exilés, Hans retrouve un second souffle. Mais qui est Chuck? Il faudra des années avant que le mystère qui entoure sa véritable identité se dissipe. Ce très beau livre, souvent comparé à Gatsby le Magnifique, est à la fois une parabole sur la fin du rêve américain et un roman d'amour aux résonances poignantes.

'New York is not what most people imagine it to be. Just as marriage, family, friendship and manhood are not. Netherland is suspensful, artful, psychologically pitch-perfect, and a wonderful read. But more than any of that, it's revelatory. Joseph O'Neill has managed to paint the most famous city in the world, and the most familiar concept in the world (love) in an entirely new way.' Jonathan Safran Foer

`O'Neill writes a prose of Banvillean grace and beauty, shimmering with truthfulness, as poised as it unsettling. As well, this is a story that is hard to put down, for its characters are so real and their preoccupations so urgently of the now, that the book has the vividness of breaking news. He is a master of the long sentence, of the half-missed moment, of the strange archeology of the troubled marriage. Many have tried to write a great American novel. Joseph O'Neill has succeeded.' Joseph O'Connor

'Somewhere between the towns of Saul Bellow and Ian McEwan, O'Neill has pitched his miraculous tent ... The reader, almost imperceptibly, becomes little by little scorched by the novel's brilliance, irradiated by it, benignly." Sebastian Barry --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Joseph O'Neill est né en 1964 à Cork, en Irlande. Ancien avocat au barreau de Londres, il vit depuis plus de dix ans à New York. Dès sa sortie en 2008, Netherland a connu un immense succès, porté par une critique unanime. Troisième roman de Joseph O'Neill (le premier publié en France), ce livre a reçu le Pen/Faulkner Award.