Netherland is one of the best books of the 21st century
According to a panel of me.
Good morning.
Today I’m sharing an essay about a novel I’ve loved since it came out nearly twenty years ago: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill.
I’ve been meaning to write about this novel for a while. I recently re-read it and loved it as much as ever. And so with the New York Times “100 Best Books of the 20th Century” discourse still somewhat in the air, I figured I’d write about this book, which isn’t on that list. For the record: I don’t care that it’s not on that list.
This might be a bit long and not up your alley. So, as always, no hard feelings if you skip reading.
I.
At the beginning of June, my fiancee and I were getting ready to head to New York for almost two weeks. Her sister’s roommate was out of town so we were going to have a free place to stay—minus paying for a few dinners, lunches, and iced lattes.
We would use the trip to make in-real-life appearances at our jobs and to enjoy New York at the start of the summer a little over a year after we moved away.
When I was packing and thinking of a book to bring with me, my first choice was the novel Netherland by Joseph O’Neill.
Joseph O’Neill is an Irish writer who is now sixty years old. When Netherland was first published, it was his third novel. Since then he’s published two additional novels. I’ve read one of those: The Dog (2014). I actually know very little about Joseph O’Neill and don’t have much interest in learning more about him. I love Netherland dearly and that’s all that really matters.
Netherland was published in 2007, the year I graduated from college. I’m honestly not sure how I first got a copy of it. I must have asked for it as a Christmas gift. Each year, I usually take a haphazard pass through the New York Times Book Review’s best books of the year and select a few titles to request for gifts based on a brief skim of their plots.
This has been my general strategy for keeping up with contemporary literature for about twenty years. And ever since I first read O’Neill’s novel it has been one of my favorite books.
II.
Why do I love Netherland so much? Because it is one of those books that, upon first reading it and during every successive time re-reading it, just feels like the platonic ideal of a novel.
That might be because in its style and broad structure it bears a passing resemblance to The Great Gatsby. The novel is about a Dutch stock analyst (specializing in crude oil) named Hans van den Broek who has come to New York from London with his wife and son right before 9/11. After 9/11 Hans’s wife, Rachel, doesn’t feel safe in New York and their marriage begins to crack under that weight. Rachel returns to London and the couple attempt a trial separation.
During that trial separation, Hans becomes involved in a cricket league and meets a Trinidadian man named Chuck Ramkissoon. In Hans’s loneliness, he drifts into Chuck's orbit.
Chuck is painted as charismatic and larger than life character who has his hands in a lot of pots—one of them is a scheme to create a cricket stadium in New York City and a national cricket league in the United States. Chuck is also involved with some underhanded dealings with associates around the city. In fact, we are first introduced to Chuck at the beginning of the novel after his body is found in the Gowanus Canal.
The plot isn’t remotely similar to The Great Gatsby, but the shape of a reserved but eloquent narrator who works in the world of finance developing a somewhat tenuous friendship with a man who is involved in some level of criminal activity brings it to mind.
In terms of style, take this example from the very start of the novel. This comes after Hans recalls a conversation he had with a senior vice president at his bank in London. He has told the man he is moving to New York and the man tells him how much he misses living in New York. At the time, Hans is turned off by his sureness but looking back on the exchange he feels differently.
“But it turns out he was right. Now that I, too, have left that city, I find it hard to rid myself of the feeling that life carries a taint of aftermath. This last-mentioned word, somebody once told me, refers literally to a second mowing of grass in the same season. You might say, if you’re the type prone to general observations,that New York City insists on memory’s repetitive mower—on the sort of purposeful postmortem that has the effect, so one is told and forlornly hopes, of cutting the grassy past to manageable proportions. For it keeps growing back, of course.”
When I first encountered that passage at twenty-two years old, my freshly post-graduate eyes must have turned to hearts. That has Fitzgerald’s style all over it. Even reading it now, I half expect him to use the phrase “to the wingless.” Ah, hell, let’s just compare that passage from the first chapter of The Great Gatsby.
“Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.”
That kind writing paired with the fact that the story is, on some level, about a tentative new friendship between two adult men made Netherland appeal to me immediately and ever since.
Stories about friendship fascinate me because, as I’ve written before, the mystery of friendship baffles me even more than the mystery of love. And it's always been a dream of mine to write a very good story—a novel even!—about two people who hesitatingly approach friendship at a more advanced stage of life.
I’m almost forty. I haven’t gotten there yet, but maybe someday I will.
III.
Earlier this month, amid the discourse of the New York Times “100 Best Books of the 20th Century” list I was led to Zadie Smith’s 2008 essay “Two Paths for the Novel” in The New York Review of Books.
I’m not sure how I was led to Smith’s essay. In my half-focused perusal of links and Notes and Reddit threads and shared X links via text and Slack I came to it as part of someone’s case that Netherland should be on the New York Times’s list.
In her 9,000 word essay, Smith makes the case (among many other things, I think) that Netherland is a finely written novel that is aware of its place in the history of the novel and as a work of “lyric realism” and that, although the novel is finely written, it lacks a certain level of realism and is in fact limited by its form.
After highlighting a trademark passage of O’Neill’s wonderful writing in Netherland, Smith wrote the following.
“An interesting thought is trying to reach us here, but the ghost of the literary burns it away, leaving only its remainder: a nicely constructed sentence, rich in sound and syntax, signifying (almost) nothing. Netherland doesn’t really want to know about misapprehension. It wants to offer us the authentic story of a self. But is this really what having a self feels like? Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really Realism?”
Here Smith is referring to the style O’Neill has adopted in the novel as well as the narrative’s technique of jumping back and forth in time and of Hans’s frequent well-formed reveries. And she calls into question if this is really how our experience of time, memory and the search for self really works; if this is the actual way to convey it in fiction.
As someone who has been fairly obsessed with realism in fiction (whether in stories or novels or movies or TV shows) I see Smith’s point. O’Neill’s book is decidedly not a true representation of how time feels or how memory works or how the world comes to us. But not many books that are defined as Realism are.
Smith contrasts Netherland with a novel called Remainder by a British novelist named Tom McCarthy. I’ve never read McCarthy’s work and hadn’t heard of him until I read Smith’s nearly twenty-year-old essay. I can’t really say if Smith’s comparison makes sense or if the points she makes through comparing the works add up.
I don’t know when the last time you read a work of literary criticism was, but, and excuse my glibness here, is it a trip!
The thing is, I used to read things like this all the time when I was an undergraduate in college and even a recent graduate in my early twenties. But my brain, I think, swims in much shallower waters now. I’m not sure I got much past five feet anyways.
Reading Smith’s essay was like playing in a pickup basketball game with someone who is trying a little bit too hard. “We’re just trying to have some fun here,” I wanted to say. “Why do you care so much?”
But that’s perhaps because I haven’t been training myself to read fiction as I once did. Or, maybe, it's because I’ve gotten to a point in my life where I’ve tried so hard to make something that someone or anyone would like that my view on works on art have softened in some way. “Let the thing be,” I wanted to say as I read Smith’s essay. “It was probably hard enough to finish and get it published.” I wonder if Smith looks back at writing from her younger days and thinks this. Probably not. But I don’t really know much about her at all either.
I’m sure that’s not an appropriate way to think about or analyze art. It probably isn’t. It’s probably dangerous to not expect more from a novel or any creative work. And there was a time where if a book wasn’t pushing the boundaries of how the human consciousness and experience of reality were actually relayed in something that followed the Modernist tradition that I judged it and judged it harshly.
I’m too old for that now I think. I want truth and honesty in a book above all. And I think there is truth and honesty in Netherland.
IV.
After reading Smith’s essay, I started thinking about some recent novels that were in some way meant to be works of Realism that somehow relayed the way we actually experience the world.
The examples that came to mind were The Guest by Emma Cline (2023), All Fours by Miranda July (2024), My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018), Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (2021), and Motherhood by Sheila Heti (2018).
Cline, July, and Moshfegh’s books are linked in my mind because they each focus on protagonists who run the spectrum of unlikeable and are each Realist in form generally but are heightened by something that, I think, borders on satire. (July’s book is purely funny in many parts.) All three of those books are well written and compelling: you want to see what is going to happen to the main characters, you want to see how far they are going to go with their schtick.
But by the end, you don’t feel anything. At least I didn’t. And at the end of Cline’s book in particular, you are left thinking that perhaps the story took the easy way out.
Rooney’s book is the most classically Realist. You read her novel and think: Yes, there are people who live like this in the world and this is how they navigate friendship and love and treat each other. The epistolary structure within the book mimics kind of how we live: through missives written to each other on a computer.
But the book that actually felt the most, to me, like how we experience reality today was Sheila Heti’s Motherhood. When I tried to explain the style of the book to my fiancee all I could say was, “I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like fiction or nonfiction—it’s just like good writing.”
That novel is a work of autofiction I guess and it is really a meditation on a woman’s decision to have a child or not and what that means or doesn’t mean about her as a woman. It's one of those contemporary books that is chunky and broken up into lots of paragraphs—kind of something like the Axiosification of fiction (think Brian Washington), which I am generally inclined to dislike but for some reason was riveted by in Heti’s book. To me, it felt closest to the way I interact with and process words and language every day.
Maybe it's because my fiancee and I are at the point where we are deciding when and whether or not to have children that it left me feeling deeply moved at the end. I am not a sex worker who is attempting to maneuver her way to a better life in the Hamptons (The Guest). I am not a woman looking to take prescription drugs and sleep for a year (My Year of Rest and Relaxation). I am not a woman trying to maintain a long term friendship and fall in love (Beautiful World, Where Are You). I am not middle aged artist who wants to feel unburdened by her life and who is grappling what it means to still strongly desire sex at a point where you begin to lose your desirability as a sexual object (All Fours).
But I am a man in a relationship with a woman who is actively thinking about the idea of motherhood. Maybe that makes me biased.
All of the books I’ve mentioned here are “good” books and they certainly each work on some level. And Heti’s novel is maybe one of the best books I’ve read in several years.
But I don’t think I’ll reread any of them in the way I always come back to Netherland.
V.
I always come back to Netherland, I think, for three reasons.
Like I said, it just feels like a novel to me. One where I sink into the story and into the world and feel wrapped in it the whole time.
In some sense, it is a novel that is about friendship and the mystery of friendship fascinates me.
It is probably the best novel about what it feels like to actually traverse New York City that I’ve ever read.
It seems like we’ve covered the first reason pretty well so far.
Regarding the second reason: I’ve gone very long on my thoughts on friendship elsewhere and this essay is already getting a bit longer than I’d like.
What I will say is that when I used to apply for MFA programs about seven or eight years ago, my personal essay revolved around Netherland and its depiction of friendship.
Looking back on that essay now, it isn’t all that bad. The crux is that Chuck and Hans’s friendship in Netherland is rooted in the love of a sport, cricket, like so many adult male friendships are. And that because they are both foreigners, albeit of very different origins, they end up feeling a sense of belonging with each other and with America through their love of a foreign game.
But that essay takes a pretty pessimistic turn and it surprises me, still, how much I believe what I concluded it with. It’s lazy, but I’m going to reproduce it here:
When Chuck’s body is found, a reporter calls Hans and asks him if he and Chuck were business partners. “No,” Hans says, “you’ve been misinformed. He was just a friend.” Chuck wanted Hans, with his finance world affluence, to invest in his cricket league. However, Hans remained distant and was never fully committed to the league, never gave himself to Chuck’s dream of cricket—and of America. This leads to the confused nature of their relationship to anyone looking in from the outside.
In the wake of Chuck’s death, Hans meets with another of Chuck’s business associates and tells him that Chuck was a “personal friend.” The man counters by saying, “He told me you were the director of his company. Then he told me you were a nonexecutive director. Then he told me you were involved, but only informally.”
Near the end of the novel, When Hans discusses Chuck with his wife, she says to him, “I mean you were valuable to him. He wasn’t interested in you. Not really. Not in you.” Hans ruminates on this and disagrees with his wife. “However much of a disappointment Chuck may have been at the end,” he thinks, “there were many earlier moments when this was not the case and I see no good reason why his best self-manifestations should not be the basis of one’s final judgment. We all disappoint eventually.”
And Hans’s assessment—that we all disappoint eventually—sums up so many of the male friendships I have experienced. A bond and camaraderie starts through sport or something just as trivial. Then it blossoms into shared experiences and a prolonged period of loyalty. But then, the relationship evolves, charisma and strength become disappointment and weakness. There are no hard feelings, but the friendship dissolves. Each time I read Netherland I expect it to be different, and each time it remains the same.
For some reason, and maybe it's my own hang ups and self-hatred, I associate friendship with disappointment. Because at the end of the day, you will disappoint a friend in some way and a friend will disappoint you.
Friendship, the kind that is beyond the partnership you have with someone you live with or marry, eventually must recede in some way. There are other obligations, other relationships that must take precedence. In the end, what the friendship actually was and the magic of how it started and formed until it was a bright and shining thing that warmed the center of your life escapes you. It’s hard to remember it all.
And chasing why it happened, why that connection existed at all, is something that strikes me as more magical than love in many ways.
V.
That brings us to the final reason why I love the book: Netherland is the best example of the experience of discovering New York that I have seen relayed in a novel.
Disclaimer: I have not read every novel about New York City. I know that might be a surprise, but it’s true. In any case, I do think this is the best one.
Why?
Because so much of the book takes place in parts of New York that you don’t think about when you first imagine or enter the city but then become key markers and guideposts on your understanding of its expanse.
My first job in New York was as a paralegal/assistant for a real estate and matrimonial attorney. A lot of my job involved going to coop management offices all over the city and sitting in fluorescent or lamp-lit conference rooms and reading minutes from the coop board meetings so that I could summarize them and give them to our clients as they considered their purchase.
I lived in Williamsburg at the time and these trips were my introduction to nooks and crannies in Grand Concourse, Flatbush, Clinton Hill, the Financial District, Bed Stuy, Prospect Heights, Kensington, and Woodside, among others. I learned the subway system by taking these trips.
In Netherland, the cricket field where Chuck is planning to build his cricket stadium is at Floyd Bennett Field, which is not exactly a major New York landmark. But O’Neill writes about the first time Chuck takes Hans there with a true sense of place. “We swung onto the Belt Parkway and for ten minutes followed its semicircle past Bensonhurst and Coney Island and Sheepshead Bay, the night now descending over the Rockaways and a blinking jet plane going low over the dismal wetlands of Jamaica Bay.”
Hans lives in the Chelsea Hotel when he and his family have to evacuate their Tribeca hotel in the aftermath of 9/11. Chuck lives in Flatbush and O’Neil writes Hans’s impressions of Flatbush lovingly. “What respite it was, after the working week, to catch the Q train at Union Square and alight miles from Manhattan at Cortelyou Road Station, with its pavilion suspended over always-gleaming tracks, and to stroll along Cortelyou Road into the pooled green shadows of Rugby Road. From the corner, it was thirty steps to the Ramkisson place.” (Note: I once drew up closing papers for my attorney to help a client close on an apartment on Cortelyou Road.)
That’s just one exemplary passage. But there are many others. There’s one in particular that reminds me of car or cab rides heading out or back to JFK. “I found myself, that Friday night in late May, traveling with a clueless but cooperative Kyrgyz limousine driver. On the Long Island Expressway I guided him past the red neon signs of Lefrak City and a certain Eden Hotel past Utopia Parkway, and then, following instruction I’d been given, down the turnoff at exit 27…Propelled into a Nassau County nowhere, we made our way back to Queens and finally ran into Hillside Avenue, from where the route was more or less clear.”
These passages make my heart soar every time I read them. I was never a financial analyst and I never played cricket and I never knew a Trinidadian man who lived in Flatbush. But I saw New York this way and this is the way I will always see and love New York: full of yet another neighborhood or kind of life you never knew could exist, ones that remind you that your world is only one of very many and that there are very many ways to live in this world.
So, of course, when I was coming back to New York to stay for almost two weeks in June I wanted to bring Netherland. I would be in the city but I wanted to immerse myself in the way I’d learned to see and feel the city.
VI.
In 2006 or 2007 my family purchased a second home in a new townhouse development in Arverne. This was when Rockaway was just becoming a developer’s hot spot.
The home was completed in 2008 or 2009 and I spent a lot of time out there with my friends and my family. I’d take the train from Williamsburg down on a Friday night and stay the weekend. On Sunday evening, my dad would drop me off—kindly taking the long way back to Suffolk County.
We’d leave Rockaway via Beach Channel Road, cross over Jamaica Bay past Floyd Bennett Field, and then my dad would take the Belt Parkway to Pennsylvania Avenue. From there, we’d drive northwest up Pennsylvania through New Lots until it became Bushwick Avenue. And we’d continue on Bushwick Avenue passing faded townhouses until we came to Grand Street where the East Williamsburg Scholars Academy stood on, funnily enough, the east side of Bushwick.
Turning down Grand Street, we pulled up to my apartment between Leonard and Manhattan, which, at the time, was above a nail salon. I’d get out of the car and into the hot night that awaited me in my AC-less apartment and feel a sense of emptiness.
I was leaving the pleasantness of a brand new townhouse by the ocean to come back to my life, which was the life of a 24- or 25-year old making $30,000 dollars a year in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I had nothing to speak of: no career, no notoriety, no true love.
All I had was my youth and my friends and the way parts of New York were slowly being shaded in on the map each time I journeyed out. Or so it felt.
My family sold the townhouse some time in the 2010s, but I feel as if I’ll always see New York that way—from the vantage point of driving back from Rockaway Beach through parts of Queens and Brooklyn that are often forgotten or overlooked parts of a vague Long Island.
And in my heart I will always be that guy in his early twenties, lucky to have friends around him and feeling as if something great might happen if he stuck it out long enough. As one of my dear friends from that time and I used to say to each other. “Gotta see what happens next.”
Netherland isn’t really about any of those things. And maybe its form of Realism fails. But it makes me feel alive and glad to have lived every time I read it.
It is one of the best books of the 21st century. That is if you care about things like that.
I read Netherland on your recommendation and really enjoyed it. It’s been a long time since a novel made me teary-eyed at the end! Also read Having and Being Had (Eula Biss) and enjoyed that as well. Thanks for sharing your reading!