Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

I didn't notice until after I started reading it, but my most recent read has a very famous and powerful fan.  The book had a lot of stickers on it, and I was so distracted by the square one touting it as "Buy 2, Get the 3rd FREE" that I missed the red circular one right over the title.

That's a Presidential sticker of approval!

It's a bit of an odd choice for an American president, really, as there are precious few Americans in it.  The narrator Hans, a Dutch financial analyst and his wife, an English attorney (or should I say barrister?) move to New York from London.  Their marriage falls apart, with Rachel taking their son back to England after 9/11,  purportedly due to the danger but really because of the growing space between them.  Hans finds solace in the city, cricket, and a cricket umpire/entrepreneur named Chuck Ramkissoon--the only American in the book, having earned his citizenship after immigrating from Trinidad. 

We learn early in the book that Hans moves back to London after several years in NY, and that Chuck has been murdered.  Oddly, the book mostly ignores this grisly fact; it's clear that Chuck is involved in shady dealings, but the book is not a whodunit or an exploration of how things went wrong for an ambitious man.  It's primarily about the dislocation people feel--dislocation between home and residence, between morality and expedience, and between love and disgust. 


I didn't enjoy the book quite as much as Mr. Obama apparently did.  It was interesting, but it doesn't feel like a book that will stick with me.  It certainly tells a story about an unlikely friendship and hints at the complexity of America and Americaness--but to what end?  It's a book that asks for rumination, but I couldn't connect with the things it was asking me to ponder.  I've never been outside the country, let alone lived as an expatriate.  It may be a book that I read the first time and don't quite connect with, then read again at a different point in my life and feel it's speaking directly to me.   


Bonus knowledge: The book led me to do a little research about something that had long confused me--do Dutch people come from Holland or the Netherlands?  Turns out that people are usually wrong when they say Holland---it's akin to referring to the United States as California or New York.  The country is properly called the Netherlands, and Holland is but a large and commercially important part of the country where most of the big cities are.  It started out as an honest mistake (most international traders did work with sailors who were Hollanders, and thus referred to the country of origin as Holland) but it's stuck over centuries.