What is a cricket club doing in a 9/11 novel? As its acclaimed author – and Staten Island cricketer – Joseph O’Neill tells, it’s obvious
Joseph O’Neill, a lean, dark, Irish-born author raised in Holland, educated at Cambridge, trained at the English bar and resident in New York, was, until recently, unaware of his genius. Indeed, prior to the recent publication of his novel, Netherland, he was a peripheral public figure: an author known for two comic novels and an arresting family memoir, Blood-Dark Track; an insightful, readable critic; and as the husband of Vogue’s sassy fashion writer Sally Singer. Netherland – the first great novel set in the world of New York cricket – has changed everything. Now O’Neill is fêted by the magi of the American literary establishment. He sits at the top of Amazon’s best-seller lists. Manhattan taxis play interviews with the author on their in-car TVs. New York Magazine, meanwhile, has declared O’Neill “King of New York”. But what really ices his cake is the literary company he is now said to keep: F Scott Fitzgerald, Philip Roth and VS Naipaul to name three. To these, one might add Saul Bellow.
Near the beginning of Herzog, Bellow’s 1964 novel, there is a particularly lovely passage in which the author describes a wooden-legged character “bending and straightening gracefully like a gondolier”. It is a simile for which many Bellow fans (Ian McEwan for one) reserve particular affection, because the connection is at once rich and economic, exotic and familiar. In short, Bellow nails it. Netherland heaves with gondolier moments. Indeed, as the story of Hans, a Dutch oil-futures analyst living in New York, unfolds, we are treated to some extraordinary images. Watching the fielders on a cricket pitch walk in to crowd the batsman and then withdraw to their original positions, for instance, O’Neill notes “a repetition of pulmonary rhythm, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors”.
The author, now sitting in South Kensing-ton drinking coffee by the gallon, flushes at the comparison with Bellow. “Well, that’s a generous thing for someone to say,” he says, his queen’s English drifting occasionally towards the Atlantic. “Bellow’s in my DNA. Seize the Day and Herzog were the seminal reads of my youth.”
But when it comes to a central motif, O’Neill is indebted to nobody. In the aftermath of 9/11, we follow the hotshot oil sage and Rachel, the wife he met in London, as their marriage disintegrates. As he hits rock bottom, Hans discovers the game of his Dutch youth, cricket, being played in New York by an amiable band of immigrants, joins the Staten Island Cricket Club and becomes embroiled with a shady, gregarious Trinidadian dreamer called Chuck.
Hans’s life closely mirrors O’Neill’s. Hans grew up in the Netherlands before working in London, moving with his wife to New York, where he stayed, after 9/11, at the Chelsea Hotel. O’Neill, though born in Ireland, spent much of his childhood in Holland before working as a barrister in England and then moved to New York, where he now lives with his wife and his three boys at the Chelsea Hotel. It may not be surprising to learn that he is also an integral member of the Staten Island Cricket Club – a club comprising many players from the West Indies and Indian sub-continent, but only one Irish novelist.
Was he selfconscious about putting so much of his own life into Netherland? “Well, yes, because I knew I wanted to,” he says. “Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That’s the way I do it, anyway.”
O’Neill had conceived a novel set in the world of New York cricket long before 9/11, but he knew when he saw the image of the second plane hitting the tower from a diner in Chelsea that he needed to include – even shape his novel around – that bright Tuesday morning. “To me, it felt compulsory,” he says. “You can’t write a novel about New York City, about the experience of being in New York and America, without writing about 9/11. So I felt unselfconscious – the best way to be. I think if you set off in the morning saying, ‘I’m going to write my 9/11 novel’, you run the risk of becoming a falling man yourself.”
The slight at Don DeLillo’s awkward 9/11 novel, Falling Man, is not a pointed one. O’Neill will later explain his feeling that some authors rushed into writing about the attack on the World Trade Center, and that the results were muddied. “It took a while for the effects of 9/11 to make themselves apparent,” he says. “It took me seven years to write this book. That’s a long time.”
What emerges from the rubble in Netherland is not only O’Neill’s despondency with the Bush administration’s belligerent reaction to the atrocity – a despondency voiced less by Hans than by his impassioned wife – but Hans’s inability to decide upon the significance of the moment. Before Rachel decides to leave the city and return to London with their child, he attempts to understand how to avoid “what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the 1930s 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”.
It turns out that Hans and Rachel are in a new situation, one in which all the rules have changed. In this world, Hans’s new friend Chuck dreams of bringing cricket to the American masses. It is the relationship between Hans, the puzzled observer, and Chuck, the American dreamer with a firm sense of his destiny (his motto is “Think fantastic”), that brings to mind The Great Gatsby.
“It was unintentional,” says O’Neill. “I was about three-quarters of the way through the book when I realised my plot was Gatsby’s plot. But then there are only about three plots in the world, anyway. Now when I think about the relationship of Netherland to Gatsby – a book I love – I would say it’s a farewell to Gatsby. Because the premise of Gatsby is that America is this exclusive, privileged land of opportunity. And that is not the case any more. In the globalised economy, the great narrative of the American dream has been dissipated.”
The collapse of this defining concept is not the only symptom of the country’s sickness. In one of his scatty, philosophical monologues, Chuck provides a sweeping diagnosis, saying: “Americans cannot really see the world.” But Hans, a fellow immigrant, does not suffer from this blindness. “Hans is constantly looking – he’s focusing on things or looking out of windows, always trying to observe and constantly finding it a challenging experience,” says O’Neill. “The whole business of what it means to see, and what it means to penetrate what is happening around us in one’s understanding, is alive in the book.
“This leads to the question of cricket. Americans don’t really see it. They don’t notice it’s happening in their cities. When they do see the game, they can’t understand it, no matter how many times you try to explain it to them. And so the question is – and this is a question Chuck asks himself: how can the United States consider itself to have developed fully when it can’t bring a game like cricket, with all its connotations, into its ken?
“Chuck feels that this defect in the American outlook is one he can cure. It’s a crazy idea, but people in America think like that and they are given credit for it. In Britain, it’s the opposite. Shrinkage, rather than expansion, is the national obsession. Here we ask: how can we cut everything down to size?”
Now 44, O’Neill’s best cricketing days may, he admits, be behind him. A useful batsman in his day (he represented Holland under19s and played irregularly for the Cambridge University second XI), he no longer secretly dreams of getting “the phone call”. What he continues to love about playing the game is that “it’s a childhood activity I’m still pretty much capable of doing”. And he enjoys how cricket looks.
“There is a visual and aesthetic dimension to the game which I love, and which, intriguingly, has been completely changed in the past year because of the Indian Premier League [which features dancing girls and brightly coloured kit]. In many senses, Hans’s idea of the game is already outdated. It’s been overtaken by this Indian version of the game, which is gaining ground. The spectacle of men wearing white is going to become increasingly rare. Everyone’s going to start wearing pyjamas.”
O’Neill’s teammates, not all of them avid novel-readers, have enjoyed the book, although they admit to being taken aback by the wave of publicity that has washed over their club. What may be more surprising to them is that, while they were considering how best to attack an opposing batsman, one of their number was drawing together a novel set in their little polyglot world. It was not, I suggest, an obvious idea.
“You don’t think so?” says O’Neill, smirking. “Over the past five years, people would ask me, ‘What are you doing?’ I’d reply, ‘It’s a novel set in the world of New York cricket.’ They’d recoil slightly and you could almost hear them thinking, ‘Oh dear, poor fellow, he’s lost it. Poor Sally, she’s going to have to pick up the pieces.’ And there were times when I felt that too.”
O’Neill can stop worrying. Netherland might not be the Great American Novel – it is not Blood Meridian or The Scarlet Letter – but it is an American novel touched by greatness. And, with a formidable publicity machine behind it (how long before the Oprah interview?), O’Neill can be sure his readership will increase exponentially. Achieving this will not be a Herculean task. Until Netherland, O’Neill admits, “my reading public consisted of my sisters”.