Netherland by Joseph O'Neill - Book Report/Review Example

Hans is left alone in unmoored and least suitable surroundings. This is what he narrates most about trapped in suspended animation, adrift, letting do. Luckily he befriends a forceful Trinidadian, Chuck, who umpires cricket games of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, England and the Caribbean (Wilson 218). The teams meet weekly in a scrubby patch of Park of Staten Island. The old umpire’s dream is to establish cricket to be American sport and at the same time to get rich. The old man’s dream is hampered in Chuck’s violent death, which Hans gets informed about just as he is getting his family life back in London.

Although Netherland has been publicized as a September 11th novel, and Hans being likened with Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, fiction’s greatest American Dreamer, it amazes by his resemblance with Richard Ford a sportswriter who is adrift and in great mourning for his family life. Netherland is a work that covers the tidal swing of grief through a man whose ambition is just to stay afloat (Wilson 222). It is a novel that is full of outstanding descriptive passage that poses a high, almost hallucinating brilliance.

There is one vital part that Han touches on the confusion of emotions that caught him after his mother died and admits that this is the time that precipitated his retreat into distractedness.Netherland is then a book about the cost of leaving. All of the main characters have left their homelands to try to become Americans by or, for instance, in Chuck's case, by crook. Hans starts to find himself only after his wife abandons him for London and then he must leave America to go and find her. Ironically, when they meet and settle down in London, the couple becomes more demonstrably pro-American (Wilson 229).

Probably what O’Neill has written is indeed a novel that contemplates on the Great American Dream. The novel certainly has the scan and sweeps such an epic undertaking, regardless of the way its narrator sees America as though half-closed eyes and, eventually, gains neither the ambition nor the ruthlessness to become a great American success. Joseph O’Neill has created through Hans van den Broek an unlikely hero – a soberly minded man who is striving to find his way back home to his own self (O’Neill 314).