Netherland

Netherland
Joseph O’Neill

In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal.In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off-kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the powercut and the Iraq war. Those years were difficult for Hans – his English wife Rachel left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and silences in their marriage, and he spent two strange years in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents.Lost in a country he'd regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in a most alien place – the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city's most marginal parks. It was during these games that Hans befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreamed of establishing the city's first proper cricket field. Over the course of a summer, Hans grew to share Chuck's dream and Chuck's sense of American possibility – until he began to glimpse the darker meaning of his new friend's activities and ambitions.‘Netherland’ is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between. It is a novel of a marriage foundering and recuperating, and of the shallows and depths of male friendship. With it, Joseph O'Neill has taken the anxieties and uncertainties of our new century and fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty and brilliance.

JOSEPH O’NEILL

Netherland

Contents

Cover (#uc49ced7a-89e2-5a15-abc7-84c5a96aaee6)

Title Page (#ucbc992bd-600e-51a1-a779-47079c2f066d)

Dedication (#u659af32e-c7c2-5875-b24d-8bf4cf8dd52b)

Epigraph (#u3ea7de54-3c14-534f-9165-cf2234992dcd)

Chapter 1 (#ub4175432-6bf8-5c87-9dc2-ab7d93605a1e)

Chapter 2 (#u1fe35c02-f74c-5982-bab7-aa7dcf75a6d3)

Chapter 3 (#ufbf801d2-5302-5f18-8731-773d076545d7)

Chapter 4 (#u0fdd95bc-6085-5d11-8ccf-ca009947f15e)

Chapter 5 (#u56087bc8-a949-51ac-be83-b86df83b50d9)

Chapter 6 (#u44421dfc-ee8e-59c3-9291-90cbe4f372b1)

Chapter 7 (#uf91752c4-d1f1-5c8f-99d5-3e860a06104c)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features… (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

All Over America (#litres_trial_promo)

Life at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo)

A Capricious XI of Favourite Books (#litres_trial_promo)

A Writer’s Life (#litres_trial_promo)

Read On (#litres_trial_promo)

Have You Read? (#litres_trial_promo)

If You Loved This, You Might Like… (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Dedication (#ulink_00708e85-1244-55a8-97cb-c14601b83bd7)

To Sally

Epigraph (#ulink_6a4eed2b-7147-548e-9cc7-d1ff9006945c)

I dream’d in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth;

I dream’d that was the new City of Friends

Whitman

Chapter 1 (#ulink_34f5bbdd-e58b-59e4-95eb-ddbaa3ae1ae2)

The afternoon before I left London for New York – Rachel had flown out six weeks previously – I was in my cubicle at work, boxing up my possessions, when a senior vice president at the bank, an Englishman in his fifties, came to wish me well. I was surprised; he worked in another part of the building and in another department, and we were known to each other only by sight. Nevertheless, he asked me in detail about where I intended to live (‘Watts? Which block on Watts?’) and reminisced for several minutes about his loft on Wooster Street and his outings to the ‘original’ Dean & DeLuca. He was doing nothing to hide his envy.

‘We won’t be gone for very long,’ I said, playing down my good fortune. That was, in fact, the plan, conceived by my wife: to drop in on New York City for a year or three and then come back.