American Innings

Even for the kind of person who has little interest in one-day Cricket or IPL face-offs, there is something sunny about the sight of park cricket on a Sunday afternoon. Joseph O’Neill’s affecting new novel Netherland celebrates the warmth and leisurely grace of this kind of cricket, and this view of life. “Men in white from one game mingled with men in white from another, and a profusion of bowlers simultaneously whirled their arms in that windmill action of cricket bowlers, and multiple batsmen swung flat willow cudgels at once, and cricket balls chased by milky sprinters flew in every direction…. From our elevated vantage point, the scene — Van Cortlandt Park on a Sunday — appeared as a cheerful pell-mell, and as we drove by Rachel said, ‘It looks like a Brueghel,’ and I smiled at her because she was exactly right.”

That is Hans and Rachel, one summer in New York, driving up Broadway, noticing several cricket matches being played in an open park. This is the couple whose failing marriage provides a narrative outline for O’Neill’s novel. Hans, a Dutch banker, and Rachel, his English lawyer wife, migrated to New York from London in 1998 (“in the American calendar, the year of Monica Lewinsky”). But soon after 9/11, they move out of their Tribeca loft into a room in the Hotel Chelsea — and then Rachel, worried about letting their little boy grow up in this city, decides that she will take him back to London. “London isn’t safe either,” says Hans, who is politically (and psychologically) more of a drifter. “But it’s safer,” replies Rachel, describing in a word how their view of life has been affected by the terrorist attacks.

The marriage will eventually survive; when the novel opens, it is 2006 and they are back together in London. Hans gets a phone call from a New York Times reporter asking about a man called Chuck Ramkissoon whose body was found in the Gowanus Canal. This Trinidadian migrant and his great obsession — the game of cricket as it is played by dozens of teams of immigrants, with quiet delight and comradeship, in the corners of various parks of New York City — are the real subjects of O’Neill’s novel.
At the same time, it is not as if moments of very real violence are far from the surface. Hans comes to...