Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1417 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

Review
'I'm reading this book called Netherland by Joseph O'Neil...it's fascinating. It's a wonderful book.'
--Barack Obama

Observer Sports
'Great cricket novels can be counted on one hand...Netherland looks as if it may top the lot!'

Telegraph
'This novel recalls Hitchcock: it is the kind of haunting book he might have made into a poignant film.'

Customer Reviews

A demanding but worthwhile read
According to the dust jacket the critics loved it. I can see why but found it very demanding. It is not a novel in which plot plays a big part. In fact, it is more an extended meditation on experience - on love,class, fatherhood, friendship,and belonging. But the prose is breathtaking at times, and there are some sections of description and reflection which I won't forget in a hurry and which make it worthwhile in the end.

Wish I'd bought something different
I feel almost apologetic about the fact that I never quite got "Netherland" - especially in the light of the other glowing reviews posted here. I bought it on the strength of the newspaper reviews, because it sounded like the kind of literary novel I really enjoy (Updike, Bellow etc).

But I found it really confusing. The fact that a novel about cricket has an ice-skater on the cover is perhaps a symbol of how oddly disjointed the events of the book are - and like many others writing here, I expected a bit of a mystery plot as the novel begins with a dead body - but no such luck.

I never really came to like or care about the reserved (and verging on pathetic, I sometimes wanted to scream) narrator Hans. I disliked his wife. I know it's lame and schoolgirly to talk about whether you "liked' characters but I just didn't really care what happened. And where other readers clearly found the elliptic writing and long sentences profoundly evocative, I just got muddled. The one saving grace was the subtlety of the falling-apart marriage and its strange journey back to wholeness: all in all I felt the book had the potential to be really good, but in the end I just found it slightly irritating.

Six
In the face of so many negative reviews for this book I'd just like to add my vote to the pro-Netherland camp. When I read this I thought it was the best contemporary novel I'd read for years, one of those supremely satisfying books where the writer just doesn't put a foot wrong. Perhaps its inclusion as a Richard & Judy selection brought it to the wrong audience or something, I don't know. Don't be put off by the cricketting aspect of the plot, Netherland is much more about belonging, marriage, early middle-age and is an excellent apercu of the atmosphere of a time and place - majestic New York in the age of anxiety.