Joseph O’Neill was born of an Irish father and a Turkish mother, grew up in Holland and went to school mainly in England. What better person to write the Great American Novel? This is a book that resonates with layers and layers of meaning, which makes it almost impossible to say in a few words what it’s ‘about’. It magnificently resists being summed up in a simple way.
The narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a Dutch equities analyst living in New York with his British wife, Rachel, and their son. The 9/11 disaster forces them out of their swish loft apartment into a slightly seedy hotel. Their marriage begins to crack, Rachel no longer feels safe, Hans seems unsure of what he feels. Rachel and their son go back to London leaving Hans where he is. The novel is the story of how he got through that time; he finds solace in the subculture of cricket. Hans is one of the few white men in the largely West Indian teams that play on scrubby lots and lesser known park grounds. Through the game of the colonialists that is now owned by the colonized, Hans meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a savvy, street-wise Trinidadian with big plans. His motto is “Think fantastic” and his fantastic obsession is to make cricket into big business in the USA. There are echoes of Gatsby here, Ramkissoon is a dreamer and doer, viewed through the eyes of a somewhat apathetic narrator, and like Gatsby he ends up dead in the water. So on one level this is a story of the American dream, but also a questioning of America’s role in the world post 9/11. After all, cricket has no need of America, it already enjoys huge audiences and multi-million broadcasting deals, it is big business without the American audience. And that seems to reflect the kind of shrinkage in vision of the Bush years in the USA, a defective view that went no further than national boundaries with no real idea of what America’s role in the rest of the world might be. Cricket represents too a universal code of fair struggle and honor. It has given the English language common phrases like “a straight bat” and “it isn’t cricket”, which are watchwords of manners and virtue. In this marvellous novel it represents both civilisation and the decline of that civilization, it represents both the assimilation of immigrants and the retention of their own culture, and it represents the process of cross-fertilization between cultures.
2 Comments
October 11, 2009 at 3:40 pm
I might have to read this one.
October 12, 2009 at 1:23 pm
In view of your proclivities (watch it when going down stairs) I’d have thought it would be an inevitable duty to read this one.