In preparation for the 2009 Tournament of Books (http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/), I have been trying to read everything on the list...but for that list, I probably would not have picked up this book, which is billed as yet another view of post 9/11 New York. I feel like there have just been too many books on this topic, and I have grown tired of the limited ways in which the situation has been portrayed. Nothing about this book changed my mind. The book focuses on Dutch-born Hans who lives in TiBeCa with his British wife Rachel, and their young son. Post-9/11, they are forced to relocate to a hotel in Chelsea, where their marriage begins to fall apart as Rachel decides that she and her son would be safer back in London. Hans remains in New York, where he seeks a comforting environment in his weekly cricket games and a strange friendship with Chuck, a native of Trinidad. O'Neill's rambling narrative is heavy on the cricket (strange, but probably delightful to a reader who knows anything about cricket) and the internationl political perspective, but as a novel, I felt it failed to grab my attention, and left me thinking that it was little more than just another post-9/11 novel.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
In preparation for the 2009 Tournament of Books (http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/), I have been trying to read everything on the list...but for that list, I probably would not have picked up this book, which is billed as yet another view of post 9/11 New York. I feel like there have just been too many books on this topic, and I have grown tired of the limited ways in which the situation has been portrayed. Nothing about this book changed my mind. The book focuses on Dutch-born Hans who lives in TiBeCa with his British wife Rachel, and their young son. Post-9/11, they are forced to relocate to a hotel in Chelsea, where their marriage begins to fall apart as Rachel decides that she and her son would be safer back in London. Hans remains in New York, where he seeks a comforting environment in his weekly cricket games and a strange friendship with Chuck, a native of Trinidad. O'Neill's rambling narrative is heavy on the cricket (strange, but probably delightful to a reader who knows anything about cricket) and the internationl political perspective, but as a novel, I felt it failed to grab my attention, and left me thinking that it was little more than just another post-9/11 novel.
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