May 16, 2008
Books of The Times
Post 9/11, a New York of Gatsby-Size Dreams and Loss
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
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NETHERLAND
By Joseph O’Neill
256 pages. Pantheon. $23.95.
Driving a rented car up the Saw Mill River and Taconic State Parkways, Hans, a Dutchman displaced in New York, thinks of the Dutch names — Yonkers, Cortlandt, Verplanck and of course Peekskill — that sprout amid places like Mohegan, Chappaqua and Ossining, and finds himself superimposing on the landscape “regressive images of Netherlanders and Indians, images arising not from mature historical reflection but from a child’s irresponsibly cinematic sense of things.” He has a similar sense of America’s vastness and panoramic possibilities when he travels up the Hudson and glimpses spectacular, unspoiled vistas of forests and mountains “canceling out centuries” — vistas unimaginable, he says, to someone who grew up in the congested, overpopulated landscape of the Low Countries.
Much of New York and America boggles his “newcomer’s imagination”: the island’s “exhilaratory skyward figures” as his taxi from Kennedy Airport crested “the expressway above Long Island City, and Manhattan was squarely revealed”; his observation that making a million bucks in 1990s New York “was essentially a question of walking down the street — of strolling, hands in pockets, in the cheerful expectation that sooner or later a bolt of pecuniary fire would jump out of the atmosphere and knock you flat”; his sense that in New York “selfhood’s hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks: that you might have no climbing boots to hand was beside the point.”
If some of these passages reverberate with echoes of “The Great Gatsby” and its vision of New York — “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes,” the “fresh, green breast of the New World,” which nourished its hero’s belief “in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us” — the reader can only surmise that they are entirely deliberate, for, like Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, Joseph O’Neill’s stunning new novel, “Netherland,” provides a resonant meditation on the American Dream.
In this case it’s the American Dream as both its promises and disappointments are experienced by a new generation of immigrants in a multicultural New York, teeming with magical possibilities for self-invention, as well as with multiple opportunities for becoming lost or disillusioned or duped.
Like “Gatsby,” “Netherland” is narrated by a bystander, an observer, who makes the acquaintance of a flamboyant, larger-than-life dreamer, who will come to signify to him all of America’s possibilities and perils. Mr. O’Neill’s narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a “reticent good egg” who works as an equities analyst for a large merchant bank. Hans grew up in the Netherlands; lived in London, where he married an Englishwoman named Rachel; and since the late 1990s has lived in TriBeCa with Rachel and their young son, Jake. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 pummel their neighborhood, Hans and his family relocate to the Chelsea Hotel; a month or so later Rachel announces that she is moving back to London with their son.
Rachel’s decision is partly based on her fear of another attack on New York: they were trying to understand, Hans recalls, “whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the ’30s or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near apocalyptic, like that of the cold war inhabitants of New York, London, Washington and, for that matter, Moscow.” And yet Hans soon realizes that his wife’s decision is also based on her conviction that their foundering marriage is doomed, that the narrative of their lives together has derailed.
Overcome by passivity and existential dread, Hans hunkers down in the Chelsea Hotel, flying to London once or twice a month to see his son, while getting more and more depressed, his existence sustained by a “succession of men who arrived at my door with beer and pizzas and sparkling water.” Hans is someone who has never really been unhappy before — a fact he attributes to his pleasant childhood in the Netherlands — and is ill prepared for the realization that his life has become an arithmetic lesson in subtraction.
Through a chance conversation with a taxi driver, who tells him about a Staten Island cricket team, Hans re-embraces the sport he loved as a boy, and is soon spending much of his free time commuting to various boroughs for matches with his new teammates, an enterprise that helps, a little, in alleviating his solitude. In time, cricket leads Hans to make the acquaintance of a “rare bird” named Chuck Ramkissoon, a charismatic Trinidadian entrepreneur and storyteller, who comes across as a combination of Jay Gatsby and one of Philip Roth’s long-winded, comic cranks.
Chuck, who runs a gamut of enterprises, from a kosher sushi business to a numbers-running scam, is clearly something of a hustler (when he learns of Hans’s work on Wall Street, he immediately says he has a business opportunity that might interest him), but he is also a dreamer with the quixotic vision of turning cricket into a national sport in America, of bringing what he sees as its civilizing and globalizing influences to the New World and building a state-of-the-art cricket field in New York. Despite his misgivings, Hans quickly finds himself charmed by his new friend.
“Because his deviousness was so transparent,” Hans says, “and because it alternated with an immigrant’s credulousness — his machinating and trusting selves seemed, like Box and Cox, never to meet — I found all of the feinting and dodging and thrusting oddly soothing. Then again, this was a time when I found solace in the patter of Jehovah’s Witnesses who stopped me in the street, a time when I was tempted to consult the fat beckoning lady psychic who sat like an Amsterdam hooker in a basement window on West 23rd Street.”
His own life, Hans says, “had shrunk to very small proportions,” and Chuck is one of the few people who notice just how truly lost he is. It’s not long before Hans finds himself driving Chuck to mysterious meetings with faintly menacing associates, and witnessing the seamier side of Chuck’s wheeling and dealing.
Hans’s account of his life cuts back and forth in time, looping back to his childhood in the Netherlands, and his life in London with Rachel and Jake. His focus, though, remains on the curious interlude he spends in New York with Chuck, who not only hauls him out of his cloistered existence as an equities analyst, but also takes him to the distant reaches of the outer boroughs and introduces him to a startling array of fellow dreamers and con artists and survivors — people, who for a time at least, become a kind of surrogate family to Hans, and reawaken him to the possibilities of life.
In recounting the story of Hans and Chuck, Mr. O’Neill — who was born in Ireland and raised in the Netherlands, and who has written two other novels and a family history — does a magical job of conjuring up the many New Yorks Hans gets to know. He captures the city’s myriad moods, its anomalous neighborhoods jostling up against one another, its cacophony and stillness, its strivers, seekers, scam artists and scoundrels. He takes us to Queens and Brooklyn, and gives us glimpses of the lives of immigrants from the West Indies, the Middle East, Africa and Russia.
He gives us Manhattan as Eliot’s “unreal city,” with crowds climbing and descending the passages and walkways of the subway system “like Escher’s tramping figures.” He gives us Manhattan as a Magritte painting, where the street looks like night, “while the sky is day.” And he gives us Manhattan as a place where anything can happen, where the visitor might encounter anyone from Monica Lewinsky wearing a track suit and large sunglasses, to a man dressed as an angel savoring his coffee and reading a newspaper.
Most memorably, he gives us New York as a place where the unlikeliest of people can become friends and change one another’s lives, a place where immigrants like Chuck can nurture — and potentially lose — their dreams, and where others like Hans can find the promise of renewal.