A T20 story from America’s oldest cricket club

That O’Neill in his other life happens to be a novelist is a matter of indifference to most of his teammates. They’re more interested in him as an accomplished batsman, a sure-handed fielder and a decent off-speed bowler. He’s also handy at contributing articles to the club bulletin.

He has clung to cricket, he said recently, because it’s his “athletic mother tongue”, and to learn baseball, say, would be like taking up a foreign language. Even if he became proficient, he wouldn’t get the jokes or the poetry.

The other European on the team is Raymond King, an Englishman who works for Verizon and has played with the club for 20 years after being turned down by a team run by the British Consulate. “I get more from chatting with these fellows than I did with my fellow Brits,” he said recently. “I love hearing the stories of different parts of the world. No matter what our religious, cultural differences, the love of Cricket overcomes all that.”

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...