A Lost Boy Grows Up

It wasn't until after I'd finished "Netherland," Joseph O'Neill's outstanding new novel, that I realized I'd been reading about cricket, which suddenly felt like I'd read a book in a language I've never studied. Cricket, of course, isn't the central concern: the staid field sport is the wormhole through which Hans, our anti-hero, passes to discover an alternate (but very real) New York City and to recognize (if not quite overcome) the ennui that has driven his wife back to her native London with their little boy. It is an essential expression of otherness—embodied by the sport and the people who play it. In fact, "Netherland"'s preoccupation is otherness. And while it might seem like the exemplars of this quality are the ethnic minorities and immigrants who populate Hans's cricket team, the real question lurking behind them is about gender otherness: what does it mean to be a man who doesn't inhabit the typical male archetype? And does that archetype even exist?

Hans's wife, Rachel, is seized with paranoia in the months after September 11, when the family has evacuated their downtown apartment. The sentiment feels familiar to those who lived in Gotham after the attacks. But although Rachel lives here (she is a lawyer; he an investment banker), she is an outsider—she becomes estranged both from her husband, who, in recent years, has ceased to relate to her beyond the rote motions of marriage, and from what she sees as America's jingoistic response, which she at first uses as cover to leave him.

Friendless and adrift in New York, Hans chats with his taxi driver and emerges with directions to a cricket club on Staten Island. The teammates and opponents he meets represent a New York seldom present in literary novels set here: Indians, Trinidadians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis. He is the only white man in any of his weekly tests, which are punctuated with tea, curries and booze. On the field, as in everyday life, his teammates are outsiders: they are forced by the Parks Department to await the conclusion of weekend-warrior softball games played on their 130-year-old Staten Island cricket pitch.

In fact, nearly everyone in "Netherland" is an outsider. The cricketers are the businessmen, gamblers, service workers and taxi drivers who fill Brooklyn and Queens, and they are why Hans—raised in the Hague—finally begins to feel at home in New York. Yet while Hans's Commonwealth friends are hardly caricatures, they are not multidimensional men whose motives and desires are plain to us. O'Neill is peering at this other New York, which is a nice change in a literary novel, but his view is little more than impressionistic. All but one of the immigrants are merely passing through the narrative.

The truly penetrating study of otherness is Hans's masculinity. O'Neill undermines the conventional notion of manhood while allowing Hans to embody the shallow qualities that are its markers: he has trouble emoting, he is a self-confident blowhard at work. It is that rare feat: a likeness that is instantly recognizable without a whiff of cliché.

As his marriage begins to falter, Hans defies the male stereotype (which Rachel has nonetheless imputed to him) of rationalism and action. Their union inverts the roles that, in their world, are seen as normal. Hans fumbles on the phone during the spring of 2003 trying to explain why America isn't the big bad hegemon she thinks (and why, therefore, she should return). Rachel lunges for the jugular, comparing the imminent invasion of Iraq to Hitler's invasion of Russia—outings to oust bad men waged by bad men. Reductio ad Hitlerum, he protests, feeling for a toehold. She easily waves him off: "Hitler is just an extreme example. You use extreme examples to test a proposition. It's called reasoning. That's how you reason. You make a proposition and you follow it to its logical conclusion."