REVIEW OF NETHERLAND Tom Wells

 Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

I chose this book after a confluence of random events. A very good friend died too young at age 52 of a brain tumour. His wife was clearing out their possessions, which included her book collection, which included such well-known titles as “The Time Traveller’s Wife,” “The Book Seller of Kabul” and “Trout Fishing in the Yemen.” This novel seemed to be an outlier, and so it was. 

The first chapter introduced a first-person narrator/protagonist who is an international banker who plays cricket in New York City and has just learned that the body of an ex-pat Trinidadian friend, with the hybrid name of Chuck Ramkissoon, has been found decomposing in a NYC canal. It was at that point that I stopped reading, thinking this would be the perfect choice for a JFDI selection. International banker. Expat. Cricket. Murder mystery. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. And it was a Richard and Judy Book Selection, meaning it must be a page-turner. Turns out, it is a meticulously written, thematically complicated tale about what James Pollock incisively described as “displacement and replacement.”

The narrator, Hans van den Broek, is the product of a safe Dutch life (“The pleasantness of my Holland was related to the slightness of its mysteries”) now working in the city formerly known as New Amsterdam. He has expertise in a niche area of global investment and an aptitude for that mostly un-Dutch and decidedly un-American sport of cricket. He also has a wife Rachel and a young son Jake. 

Major plots and sublots are as follows:

• Hans first meets Chuck in a cricket match in which Hans is a player and Chuck an umpire. Hans marvels at Chuck’s ability to defuse a disagreement that absurdly threatens to become deadly.

• The comfortable quarters in which Hans and Family reside are gutted by fire, and the three move into the metaphor-laden Chelsea Hotel (“The floors were linked by a baronial staircase, which by virtue of the void at its centre had the effect of installing a precipice at the heart of the building”). 

• Hans decides he needs driving lessons, which Chuck is only too ready to provide.

• Family relations splinter over life in America, as Rachel declaims, “It’s a question of not raising Jake in an ideologically diseased country whose leaders suffer from delusions that exempt it from the rules of the civilized behaviour it seeks to enforce on others.”  Rachel returns with Jake to England. 

• Hans tries to maintain family ties with bi-weekly (or so) trips to the UK. Job performance suffers. 

• Hans has an awkward one-night stand, while Rachel embarks on an affair that fizzles in six months.

• Hans continues with driving lessons from Chuck, eventually realising he (Hans) is providing cover for a numbers game and its brutal payment enforcement, which Chuck describes as normal business and business practice in his former homeland.

Displacement and replacement, indeed. The expat delusion that you can have it both ways.  But to that, I would add “reconciliation,” at least in the case of this book. For in the end Hans, Rachel and Jake remain a family. As Hans writes. “Rachel saw our reunion as a continuation. I felt differently: that she and I had gone our separate ways and subsequently had fallen for third parties to whom, fortuitously, we were married.”

****½