“We have an extra responsibility to play the game right.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (SEP 07, 2011)

The book jacket of the hard-bound edition is entrancingly deceptive. Printed on what feels like watercolor paper, it shows a colored vignette of men in white playing cricket on a village green watched by spectators relaxing in the shade of a spreading chestnut tree. It could well be the nineteenth century, except that the skyline in the background is Manhattan, and Joseph O’Neill’s novel is set in the first years of the present century.

Written in a style of such lucidity that it might almost be an autobiographical memoir, it is the narrative of three years or so in New York City. The protagonist Hans van den Broek, a Dutch-born financial analyst, thirtyish and near the top of his profession, arrives there at the start of the millennium with Rachel, his English wife, herself a high-powered lawyer. But after the attacks of 9/11, Rachel returns to England with their infant son. Hans stays on.

On one level, this is a novel of displacement. Having already relocated to London from Holland, Hans makes the further move to New York, where both he and Rachel prosper. But they have to evacuate their loft apartment after the attacks, and move into temporary quarters in the Chelsea Hotel, which is portrayed as an almost-surreal world unto itself. So Hans is essentially rootless before the story truly starts. By sheer chance, he stumbles upon the fact that cricket is played in New York by scratch teams of immigrants from former British colonies: Indians, Pakistanis, Caribbeans. Hans, who learned the game at an exclusive school in Holland, becomes the only white member of a team formed of taxi-drivers, store-keepers, and small businessmen, who offer him a kind of camaraderie that he cannot find among his professional colleagues.

Although cricket is an important symbolic presence, it plays a relatively minor part in the action, and it is not necessary for the reader to know the game. At first, cricket is presented as a symbol of the immigrant subculture, the thing that both brings people together and emphasizes their differences from mainstream America. As a successful Wall Street banker, Hans might be expected to fit right into New York society — and indeed the author makes the point that, as a Dutchman, he is actually a member of the historic first tribe of New York. But in soul-crushing scenes at the DMV and INS that might have been penned by Kafka, but which any victim of American bureaucracy will recognize, O’Neill does not spare Hans some of the worst aspects of the immigrant experience. Hans spends the first part of the book in a cultural limbo; when he joins the team, he find that most of his old skills come back, but he cannot bring himself to modify his patrician batting form in order to hold his own with players who learned in dirt lots; by his final American cricket game, he is hitting out with reckless abandon.

The English have an expression, “It’s not cricket,” when something contravenes an unstated social law. Later in the book, Hans remarks: “I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice.” That “imagining” is important; O’Neill gently suggests that America’s image as the champion of justice has become tarnished in the last few years. But he is also framing the moral dichotomy of the novel.

The other major character in the story is a Trinidadian immigrant, Chuck Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who thinks big and maintains a finger in every pie. At the very beginning of the book (which is all told in flashbacks), Hans learns of Chuck’s death in what seems like a mob killing. But his first chronological appearance in the story is when, as the umpire for a cricket match, he defuses a potentially dangerous situation, and follows it up with a clubhouse speech that is both a defence of the highest ideals of cricket and a potential vision of America as the Promised Land. Chuck has grandiose plans to build an international cricket stadium in New York, and he enlists Hans into furthering his vision. But he also has shady activities on the side, whose nature only gradually becomes clear. In dealing with these two sides of Chuck’s character, Hans gradually comes to re-examine his own moral sense, identity, and priorities.

But Netherland is no mere novel of ideas; it is also an emotionally wrenching love-story. For most of the book, the marriage of Hans and Rachel is virtually non-existent. When she leaves him, it is clear that she needs to escape more than the physical dangers of the bombed city. Hans flies to London every two weeks to see his son, but his relations with Rachel are painfully distant. And yet the novel opens some years later, with the two of them back together again, and apparently happy. Amazingly, O’Neill makes the fact that “you know how it all comes out” into a source of more tension, not less. The days in New York between Rachel’s decision and her actual departure are agonizing and so so true. And even when Hans leaves America and returns to London for good, the story is far from over; there is love to be found, but it must be new-forged, and it does not come easily. At one point towards the end of his stay in America (in Las Vegas, no less), Hans talks of reaching absolute bottom. But it is not Hell that he has been through, rather a very special kind of Purgatory.

The author Sebastian Barry, in a comment quoted on the back cover, writes: “The dominant sense is of aftermath, things flying off under the impulse of an unwanted explosion, and the human voice calling everything back.” Without that human voice, this story might merely be an offbeat curiosity. But O’Neill, with his clear moral compass and extraordinary power of writing from the heart, has created what may be the most moving book I have read in awhile.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 178 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (May 7, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Joseph O’Neill
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More cricket: The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya

Bibliography:

• This is Life (1991)
• The Breezes (1996)
• Netherland (2008) 

Nonfiction:

• Blood-Dark Track: A Family History (2001)

“She’s gone. She’s gone.” Paul sang the chorus of that Hall & Oates song. He sang without irony, for he was a twenty-first-century American who’d been taught to mourn his small and large losses by singing Top 40 hits.

Book Review:

Review by Debbie Lee Wesslemann (FEB 25, 2010)

War Dances, Sherman Alexie’s collage of short stories and narrative and prose poems, covers familiar Alexie territory: the melancholy comedy of ordinary lives, where irony and coincidence strike like rattlesnakes, swiftly and unexpectedly. His characters, often but not always of Native American descent, grapple with a changing culture and their place in it. They journey toward the ideal but end up, more or less, in a place no better than where they began. And although the sons pay for the sins of their fathers, the fathers suffer, too. Redemption comes when least expected, and the best intentions sour. Alexie is both cynic and comedian, toying with his characters and their impossible circumstances, rarely willing to bestow upon them the good fortune of an unequivocal happy ending.

In “The Senator’s Son,” the narrator commits an impulsive hate crime that leaves him questioning his moral fiber: on a dark street, outside a bar, he and his friends attack some gay men, one of whom turns out to be the narrator’s best friend from childhood, Jeremy. But the narrator is less worried about his friend than about what he may have done to his father, a senator with presidential aspirations: “The real question is this: Why the hell would I risk my reputation and future and my father’s political career – the entire meaning of his life – for a street fight – for a gay bashing? I don’t know, but it was high comedy.” The narrator’s remorse is rooted in the knowledge that he cannot compete with his father’s “predictable moral code,” even though his father’s actions and political beliefs may be the germs at the heart of the crime. But nothing that night ends up as the narrator expects, with both his father and Jeremy act on the strange nuances of their convictions.

In the wry, often hilarious, “The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless,” the protagonist, Paul, is a vintage clothing dealer who travels throughout the country in search of acquisitions. He is a man who lives – and wears – cultural history, from old films and jazz to pop hits and eBay. At O’Hare, he sees a beautiful woman wearing “a pair of glorious red shoes. Pumas. Paul knew those shoes. He’d seen them in an ad in a fashion magazine, or maybe on an Internet site, and fallen in love with them . . . Who knew that Paul would someday see those shoes on a woman’s feet and feel compelled to pursue her?” And so he races after the woman with a pop soundtrack playing in his head – or rather, on his iPod – and wearing a suit Gene Kelly once owned. When he finally corners her just outside the security exit, they share a brief, witty conversation, leaving him to marvel “at the gifts of strangers, at the way in which a five-minute relationship can be as gratifying and complete (and sexless!) as a thirteen-year marriage.” Because this is an Alexie story and not the law of averages, Paul runs into the woman again, in a different airport. She becomes a metaphor for his own crumbling marriage, his increasing loneliness, and, eventually, his downfall.

Alexie is best when he crafts longer short fiction, stories like the two mentioned above and the poignant “Breaking and Entering” where a man defends his home and ends up as the poster boy for racism. The more experimental but equally effective “War Dances” delivers a series of vignettes and witty observations as it tells the story of a man who goes suddenly deaf in one ear when his wife is out of the country, in Italy. He faces the possibility of his own mortality through remembering his father. However, despite Alexie’s skill with longer forms, certain shorter works stand out as well, and in these Alexie seems conscious of the connection between poetry and prose, as he titles one particularly successful piece “Roman Catholic Haiku.” A short piece written in a similar vein, “Catechism,” uses the format of questions and answers to reveal faith of a different kind, but is less successful. In the last, the prose has Haiku-like beauty without the resonance.

Likewise, the poetry is uneven. The wonderful “Ode to Mix Tapes” mourns the loss of tradition to new and easier technology in a world of point-and-click: “A great mix tape/Was sculpture designed to seduce/And let the hounds loose./A great mix tape was a three-chord parade/Led by the first song, something bold and brave . . . .” But the opening poem, “The Limited,” is slight and heavy-handed. The lines in his poetry are often quotable, succinct messages and images. In “Ode to Small-Town Sweethearts,” the teenage narrator braves a storm “for a girl” and ends up among friends, thinking “Mortals have always fought the gods/And drives epic storms for love and/or lust,/So don’t be afraid to speak honestly.”

Because of the unevenness and the mix of poetry and prose, War Dances often feels thin, without much between the covers; however, when the stories work, they evoke the pleasures of the author’s award-winning short story, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” and for those moments, this volume is well-worth the read.

Editor’s Note: War Dances is the winner of the  2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press; First Edition edition (October 6, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Debbie Lee Wesselmann
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sherman Alexie
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Native American fiction: The Red Convertible by Louise Erdrich A Yellow Blue Raft by Michael Dorris

Partial Bibliography (excludes poetry books):

• The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: Stories (1993; 2005)
• Reservation Blues (1995)
• Indian Killer (1996; 2008)
• The Toughest Indian in the World: Stories (2000)
• Ten Little Indians: Stories (2003)
• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)
• Flight (2007)
• War Dances (2009)
• Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories (October 2012)

Related:

• Conversations with Sherman Alexie by Nancy J. Peterson (2009)