The unknown Irish writer who is hitting the critics for six...
Two weeks ago the lead review in our Book Pages was of a new novel from a little-known Irish writer called Joseph O'Neill. The review, by the respected critic Brian Lynch, was headlined 'New Irish writer may be Booker contender'.
A little over the top? Although O'Neill is the author of two earlier novels and a well-received memoir, he is still relatively unknown and certainly has not been ranked among the leading contemporary novelists, either here or elsewhere.
But Lynch was insistent. He had been cocooned in the Princess Grace Library in Monaco recently as writer-in-residence and while there he had spent a month reading a proof copy of O'Neill's book, Netherland. He had been captivated. "I confidently expect this novel to be short-listed for the Man Booker Prize," he wrote in the review and suggested that it should win. A comparison with Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is apt, he said, "but add in something of the ironic intellect of John Banville and a good dash of the coarse energy of the early Saul Bellow and you will get a better idea of how rich this book is".
That was two weeks ago. Since then, Netherland has received reviews in the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Observer among others, all so ecstatic they made the headline on Lynch's review look restrained.
The New York Times devoted the cover of its Book Review magazine to Netherland and its critic called it "the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Centre fell. On a micro level, it's about a couple and their young son living in Lower Manhattan when the planes hit, and about the event's rippling emotional aftermath in their lives. On a macro level, it's about nearly everything: family, politics, identity."
In the New Yorker, James Wood -- regarded by many as the best contemporary literary critic -- went even further, comparing O'Neill to Gogol, Salman Rushdie and VS Naipaul, as well as Saul Bellow and F Scott Fitzgerald.
This is the kind of praise that would make most writers afraid to get out of bed in the morning and indeed O'Neill has admitted that he is "flabbergasted, amazed and shocked" by the response to the book so far.
What makes it all even more unexpected is that an outsider like the 44-year-old O'Neill, who was born in Cork, raised in Holland, educated in Cambridge and has lived in New York since 1998, should have written the great post-9/11 novel. Don DeLillo tried and failed with Falling Man, as did Ian McEwan with Saturday, and there have been other attempts, none successful. But O'Neill's slightly bizarre story, much of which is about playing cricket in New York, is the one that critics are now saying has finally done it.
"When I told publishers that I was writing a novel about cricket in New York people just shook their heads and walked away. There was not so much a bidding war for it as a bidding peace," O'Neill said.
But one publisher was interested and the book, seven years in the making, appeared. Netherland tells the story of Hans, a Dutch investment banker working in New York and living not far from the Twin Towers with his British wife and child. After the 9/11 attacks, they have to move. She can't cope with the changed atmosphere in the US and leaves him, taking their child back to England, where she feels it will be safer.
He ends up in the famously bohemian Chelsea Hotel and spends a lot of time with his cricket chum, a small-time builder from Trinidad called Chuck Ramkissoon. Along with a multi-national crew of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Christians, they play the game on bumpy pitches in remote boroughs of New York. Ramkissoon has a madcap plan to develop a cricket league and a stadium and Hans goes along with it, believing the universal game of cricket could save the Yanks from their insularity.
The subculture of New York cricket and its mix of immigrant races provides O'Neill with an outsider's perspective of 9/11 and what it has done to America and to the rest of the world. But his take on the subject is something that comes from his own background.
Though he grew up in the Hague, O'Neill spent summers both in Ireland and with his mother's Turkish family on the Mediterranean.
Both his grandfathers were imprisoned during the Second World War, something which he explored in his last book, Blood-Dark Track. His Irish grandfather, a small farmer and IRA man, was interned here and his maternal grandfather, a hotelier from the Turkish Christian minority, was imprisoned by the British in Palestine on suspicion of being a spy.
He writes their stories in a way that moves them from the particular to the universal, the same quality that illuminates Netherland.
O'Neill, a barrister as well as a writer, lives in the Chelsea Hotel with his wife and their three children. And, yes, he plays cricket for the Staten Island Cricket Club, where they wear whites and it feels like Surrey. So far his multi-cultural teammates are more interested in his batting than his writing. But that could be about to change.
- John Spain
