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Pantheon
May 2008
On Sale: May 20, 2008
272 pages
ISBN: 0307377040
EAN: 9780307377043
Hardcover
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Literature and Fiction Literary
In
a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11,
Hans--a
banker originally from the Netherlands--finds himself
marooned among
the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English
wife and
son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in
the country
he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the
vibrant New York
subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood
and, thanks
to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian
named Chuck
Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his
adopted country.
Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part
operator, introduces Hans to an “other” New York populated by
immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality. Hans is
alternately seduced and instructed by Chuck’s particular
brand of
naivete and chutzpah--by his ability to a hold fast to a
sense of
American and human possibility in which Hans has come to
lose faith.
Netherland gives
us both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New
York and a
story of much larger, and brilliantly achieved ambition: the
grand
strangeness and fading promise of 21st century America from an
outsider’s vantage point, and the complicated relationship
between the
American dream and the particular dreamers. Most
immediately, though,
it is the story of one man--of a marriage foundering and
recuperating
in its mystery and ordinariness, of the shallows and depths
of male
friendship, of mourning and memory. Joseph O’Neill’s prose,
in its
conscientiousness and beauty, involves us utterly in the
struggle for
meaning that governs any single life.
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