'All this garbage of light'
America has al-ways loomed large in the Filipino imagination. It is the land of possibility, where one can be whatever he wants to be regardless of his origins. We are not the only people who see America this way, but owing to our history we believe harder than anyone else that, in America, dreams come true. America is the dream, and it may be argued that our faith in the generosity and benevolence of the United States has hindered our development as a nation. The idea of America cannot fade, though its luster may be dimmed by inadequate leaders.
Dreams do not die.
But dreamers do.
The dreamer in Netherland, the novel by Joseph O’Neill, is a Trinidadian Indian named Khamraj “Chuck” Ramkissoon. When we first hear of him he is a corpse found in the Gowanus Canal. The news triggers the recollections of a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek, who knew Chuck in New York in the months following the 9/11 terror attacks. Hans, a large, non-judgmental man, lives alone at the Chelsea Hotel; his English wife Rachel has taken their two-year-old son and returned to London. He accepts this separation but avoids confronting the reasons for it. He visits his family regularly, as if he were an OFW rather than an estranged father.
Hans forms vague relationships with the eccentric inhabitants of the Chelsea Hotel, but he does not feel a sense of belonging until he starts playing cricket. That is how he meets Chuck — on a cricket field, where the voluble Trinidadian has managed to talk an enraged player into putting away his gun.
Cricket seems an improbable metaphor for a novel about immigrants in post-9/11 New York, but it’s perfect for O’Neill’s novel. Who plays cricket, anyway? Millions of people around the world put on white V-neck sweaters and flannels and stand around wickets for what seems like days, observing arcane, complicated rules. In the barely adequate playing fields of New York, the players are from the West Indies, Africa, South Asia; Hans, a white man from a former colonial power, is the outsider. To Chuck, an implacable autodidact who holds forth on everything from wild birds to kosher sushi, cricket is civilization itself.
‘We have an expression in the English language,’ he said, as silence began to establish itself amongst the players. ‘The expression is “not cricket.” When we disapprove of something, we say “it’s not cricket.” We do not say “it’s not baseball.” Or “it’s not football.” We say “it’s not cricket.” This is a tribute to the game we play, and it’s a tribute to us...
‘Every summer the parks of this city are taken over by hundreds of cricketers but somehow nobody notices. It’s like we’re invisible. Now that’s nothing new, for those of us who are black or brown. As for those who are not’ — Chuck acknowledged my presence with a smile — ‘you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I sometimes tell people, ‘You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of the cricketer. Put on white to feel black.’
Chuck’s dream is to build New York a proper cricket field, and he ropes Hans into his plan. Hans is a willing cohort even when it becomes clear that Chuck is involved in very shady business dealings (he even runs a West Indian variety of jueteng).
Joseph O’Neill is well-placed to write a post-colonial novel: his father is Irish, his mother Turkish, he grew up in the Netherlands and he now works as a lawyer in New York. The novel’s title, Netherland, means many things: the dark, fearful world after the terror attacks; Hans’s nationality; the original Dutch settlers of New York, which they called “New Amsterdam.” O’Neill’s writing recalls the shiny, chiseled prose of Ian McEwan and the largeness of Saul Bellow. Everything about this novel feels vivid and urgent — you might suddenly have the urge to take up cricket.
“And I began, in my second Chelsea spring, to take a vague sauntering interest in my neighborhood, where the morning sun hung over the Masonic headquarters on Sixth Avenue with such brilliance that one’s eyes were forced downward into a scrutiny of the sidewalk, itself grained brightly as beach sand and spotted with glossy discs of flattened chewing gum.”
There is a palpable sense of longing in O’Neill’s descriptions of the city — a yearning for a place that may not even exist, but which you want to call home.
The pallor of the so-called hours of darkness was remarkable. Directly to the north of the hotel, a succession of cross-streets glowed as if each held a dawn. The tail lights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit storefronts, the orange fuzz of the street lanterns: all this garbage of light had been refined into a radiant atmosphere that rested in a low silver heap over Midtown and introduced to my mind the mad thought that the final twilight was upon New York.
Netherland vibrates with the excitement of possibility, the belief that any moment now you will have the prize you’ve always desired.
Isn’t this the very spirit of New York: waking up, as the song goes, in the city that never sleeps, to find you’re king of the hill? You may not get it today, but tomorrow if you run faster, want more, try harder...
Only on the final page did this reader recognize the true source of Netherland.
A world was lighting up before us, its uprights putting me in mind, now that I’m adrift, of new pencils standing at attention in a Caran d’Ache box belonging in the deep of my childhood, in particular the purplish platoon of sticks that emerged by degrees from the reds and, turning bluer and bluer and bluer, faded out; a world concentrated most glamorously of all, it goes almost without saying, in the lilac acres of two amazingly high towers going up above all others, on which, as the boat drew us nearer, the sun began to make a brilliant yellow mess.
More than 80 years ago, the final page of a great American novel contained these lines:
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Joseph O’Neill has reimagined The Great Gatsby for the 21st century.
The reader should’ve seen it immediately: the shady romantic Chuck, his remains dumped in a canal; the shady romantic Jay Gatsby, floating dead in his swimming pool. Netherland begins at the end of The Great Gatsby, with its dreamer drowned by his own shimmering visions. The author even identifies his literary DNA. While visiting dead cricketers at Green-Wood cemetery, Chuck steps on a gravestone with one word engraved on it. The word, we are told, is “Daisy.”
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