The Great American Cricket Novel

Abstract

Page 16 American Book Review B O O K R E V I E W S The Great American Cricket Novel Tom LeClair Netherland Joseph O’Neill Pantheon http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon 256 pages; cloth, $23.95 About half way through Netherland, the Dutch protagonist/narrator Hans takes a pile of photographs to anAmerican woman who makes albums for clients she doesn’t know beyond their photos. “People want a story,” Eliza tells Hans. “They like a story,” even if it’s constructed by a stranger. Eliza’s comments and her successful business may partly explain why the storytelling Netherland has received so much attention—a front-page New York Times Book Review notice, the full pedantry treatment by James Wood in The New Yorker. Eliza’s own three albums—about failed marriages, wandering a remote American landscape, and creating a “gypsy home” in New York City—represent in miniature the three stories (for the price of one) that O’Neill binds together in Netherland. Central to the mid-30s Hans is the story of his marriage to a British lawyer, her leaving him, his emotional turmoil, and his eventual reunion with his wife and young son. This narrative, set mostly in contemporary New York City, requires Hans, a stock analyst, to analyze his fatherless childhood in Amsterdam, his wife’s off-center English family, and various eccentric Americans, including wacky denizens of the Chelsea Hotel where he lives. Except for the fact that the couple has two million dollars in the bank, which eases one consequence of separate households, Hans’s domestic trouble is an entirely conventional story told with considerable abstract ponderousness. After Eliza makes her comment above, Hans thinks “of the miserable apprehension we have of even those existences that matter most to us. To witness a life, even in love—even with a camera—was to witness a monstrous crime without noticing the particulars required for justice.” Fortunately , Hans does have an eye for particulars, the kind of wistful specificity that marks Richard Ford’s novels about Frank Bascombe who, like Hans, is a sports-minded businessman estranged from his family. Most of O’Neill’s particulars, though, are generated by his second story—the biography, current schemes, and violent death of Trinidadian immigrant (of Indian descent) Chuck Ramkissoon, whose name is a Western variant of Ramakrishnan, which means “charming” in Sanskrit. Shortly after Hans’s conversation with Eliza, Chuck tells Hans, “There’s always a story.” And, Hans notes, Chuck “told his own story constantly,” though not consistently , for Chuck’s “charming” narrations have lots of skips and gaps.Assembled in chronological order, Chuck’s anecdotes include life-threatening childhood poverty in Trinidad, hard-labor scrabbling in New York, setting up businesses with a shady Moldovan named Abelsky, managing both a faithful wife and younger mistress (Eliza), refereeing cricket matches, and—in the novel’s present, with Chuck in his mid50s —trying to build a first-class cricket stadium in New York. The particulars are fresh, but the outlines of this story, like the domestic tangle, are also quite conventional, the immigrant Gatsby element reviewers , following flap copy, have noted. Because of Chuck, Hans starts playing his childhood sport of cricket seriously. Though it is an extremely conventional, even ritually slow game, cricket is the original and dynamic heart of Netherland . Riding to games in the outer boroughs of New York and in neighboring states, Hans witnesses an America—largely of non-white immigrants— he would not have seen in his Manhattan office. Accompanying Chuck on errands, Hans sees the polyversity of, for example, Brooklyn’s Coney Island Avenue and listens to Chuck lecture on the cultural meanings of cricket, a saving alternative to the cut-throat competition of nativeAmerican sports. The reader in turn “listens” to Hans describe cricket particulars—the all-important, lovingly prepared turf: pitching (including “chukking”) techniques: and batting methods, all in a fascinating, because slightly opaque, specialized terminology. And yet, despite the game’s importance to Chuck and Hans, no cricket match is described in any detail. O’Neill has Hans try to finesse this lacuna by saying no one ever understood his explanation of the game, but I...