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.

Hans recalls a little speech by Ramkissoon to his motley group of immigrant players on their “extra responsibility to play the game right” in their adopted country: “We are playing this game in the United States… we have to let our hosts see that these strange-looking guys are up to something worthwhile. I say ‘see’. I don’t know why I use that word. Every summer the parks of this city are taken over by hundreds of cricketers but somehow nobody notices. It’s like we’re invisible. Now that’s nothing new, for those of us who are black or brown.…”
Hans, a white man in a field of brown and black players, is a citizen of a globalising world. He has lived and travelled in many countries, and his narration is filled with impressions of the differences between people and places, but the story he tells us is of a friendship. “Life carries a taint of aftermath,” reflects Hans, as he begins the story of this unlikely but, in the end, entirely believable friendship between men from different backgrounds, a story that returns us to the epigraph, from Walt Whitman, which describes a dream city, “a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth… the new City of Friends”.