O’Neill’s new book, Netherland (Pantheon), identifies the Staten Island Cricket Club by name, though not any of its players, and there’s a long description of Walker Park, the club’s home ground since 1876, a bumpy, crabgrass-ridden expanse just a block from the Kill Van Kull. It’s bordered now by tennis courts, a baseball field, a children’s playground and, beyond a chain-link fence, some Victorian houses that are occasionally bombarded by cricket balls, little red meteors crashing through front windows or cratering into flower beds.
Netherland, Neill’s third novel, is the story of Hans van den Broek, a Dutch investment banker working in New York, who after the 9/11 attacks finds himself exiled to the Chelsea Hotel, where, as it happens, O’Neill lives with his wife, Sally Singer, an editor at Vogue, and their three sons. (They make a cameo appearance in the novel, a “family with three boys who ran wild in hallways with tricycles and balls and trains”.)
After Hans’s British wife leaves him and takes their child back to England, he finds solace in an unlikely friendship with a Trinidadian wheeler-dealer named Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreams of starting a pro- cricket league in New York. And he finds a second home in the subculture of New York cricket.The idea of publishing a novel in the US about cricket gave him commercial qualms but not artistic ones, O’Neill said in an e-mail message. New York cricket is “bush cricket,” one of the characters in the book complains, played on wickets of cocoa mat instead of grass and on weedy, substandard pitches, where to score a run you need to bat the ball in the air instead of elegantly along the fast ground of a proper pitch. But it has a charm of its own and is played with unusual devotion.
On a recent Saturday morning Staten Island played a “friendly,” or informal, match against the Cosmos, a Queens club with a number of Jamaican players but captained by a Guyanese, Ashmul Ali. The players took the field clad all in white.
The umpires strode out, wearing floppy hats and white jackets that looked liked lab coats. And the president and tutelary spirit of the Staten Island Cricket Club, a tall, courtly Trinidadian named Clarence Modeste, bowled a ceremonial first ball, taking a running start and tossing a straight-armed lob at the stumps. Modeste’s exact age is a club mystery. All that is known for sure is that he was born before World War II and is old enough to be the father of everyone else on the team. On the sidelines, near the Walker Park field house, a slate-roofed Tudor-style building, players and onlookers sipped tea and nibbled Parle-G biscuits from India. They cheered, hollered and called out to those on the field in the lilting accent of the islands, the clipped vowels of Guyana, the lyrical syntax of Hindi-inflected English: “Well thinking, guys! Well thinking.” “Nicely batted!” “Lovely cricket — lovely!”
The match was played under a set of streamlined rules known as Twenty20, intended to end a contest in three hours, and, eager to score runs early, the Staten Islanders instead dug themselves into a hole.
O’Neill made light of the loss, saying that it was early in the season; there was another, serious match the next day, and some of the players were eager to get home to their wives and families. A little earlier he had explained: “When I met my American wife, I presented myself as a cricketer. I didn’t want to have to have any retrospective discussion. All these guys are in the same boat; it’s a negotiation.”
