A Lost Boy Grows Up

Later, she becomes his protector. At a dinner party in London, Hans demands a retraction from an excitable guest who says September 11 wasn't really a big deal. When the boor expresses faux contrition, Hans storms out. The guest appeals to Rachel—and, implicitly, to the Englishness they share and Hans does not—to see reason, but she tells him to piss off and follows her husband out. She is a model of assertiveness next to his airiness: "My difficulty," he narrates, "was that I could not disarrange the boundless, freezing dismay that undermined every personal motion I attempted. It was as if, in my inability to produce a movement in my life, I had fallen victim to the paralysis that confounds actors in dreams as they vainly try to run or talk or make love."

Chuck Ramkissoon is O'Neill's main immigrant figure—a Trinidadian umpire whom we first meet staring down a gun-wielding drunkard whose teammate Ramkissoon ejected for bad sportsmanship. He is an autodidact, a cunning entrepreneur—his latest venture, to popularize cricket in America, harnesses an outsider's means for an insider's end—and Hans's main companion in America. Ramkissoon is the apotheosis of manhood. And still he is onto the real state of things: "We're the romantic sex, you know," he tells Hans, "Men. We're interested in passion, glory. Women are responsible for the survival of the world."

Even when he knows he is supposed to experience a moment of gravity, Hans is untethered. On a business trip to discuss oil stocks—his specialty—with investors in Scottsdale, Ariz., he blithely follows three bald-headed hedge-fund analysts to a casino and gets sozzled. His wife has just called it quits; he is at his lowest point. And yet when he wanders into landscape-perfect desert vista outside a restaurant—an invitation for introspection, he can tell—his mind wanders off to "recollections, for the first time in years, of Lucky Luke, the cartoon-strip cowboy" of his boyhood.

O'Neill has nailed the male idiom of mournfulness. It is hollow, listless and solitary—exactly the opposite of the hand-wringing, garment-rending theatricality of, say, "Swingers." All along, Hans has reason to believe that Ramkissoon is not the paragon of Protestant ethics that he conveys to the world. So when Hans makes this confession to Rachel, after Ramkissoon is found murdered, she wonders why he never confronted Ramkissoon about the man's shady business dealings.

"I'm tempted to point out that our dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessmen," Hans tells us. "My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but it's the same quality that enables me to thrive at work, where so many of the brisk, tough, successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs about their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgmental offspring, and are, in sum, desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy. This chronic and, I think, peculiarly male strain of humiliation explains the slight affection that bonds so many of us, but such affectation depends on a certain reserve. Chuck observed the code, and so did I; neither pressed the other on delicate subjects."

"Netherland" feels a little pat as it winds down. O'Neill ushers Hans and his wife through abortive relationships and reunites them happily. But there's no moralizing here: although Hans is eventually seized by a go-get-her-back urge, it is too late. He worms his way back into Rachel's life only passively and somewhat coincidentally—just by being around when she needs someone. So he never discovers some miracle cure for languor: the only way out of Hans's melancholy is through it. And he emerges into a more complicated kind of manhood than we're used to seeing. In that way, "Netherland" is a coming-of-middle-age tale.

© 2008