O'Neill's novel is just marvelous. A poignant, funny and heart-wrenching account of events that unfold as a result of the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center. The fear, vulnerability and the sense of isolation that the attack exposes are palpable in passages of beautifully written prose. I found myself constantly pausing after paragraphs to reread and savor the author's descriptions.

The New York he describes is as authentic as any I have encountered in a novel: dreaded trips to the DMV are as dreadful as can be--creepy "performance artists" at the Time Square subway station are even more oppressive than the suffocating maze undergoing renovation. These "netherlands" and New York's Hudson Valley the original New Netherlands are juxtaposed to the mile high skyscrapers and Tribeca lofts that domicile the newest colonists.

Under the observant eye of Hans, a commodties analyst from the original Netherlands and his unlikely but entirely believable Trinidadian companion, Chuck, O'Neill explores the terrifying possibility of being alone in a city of eight million people. Loosely structured around their relationship to the game of cricket, Hans sets out to find something that will re-anchor and replace the sense of permanence he has lost.

I will never again hear the upstate town of Poughkeepsie pronounced without recalling the author's description as merry childish blurting. I probably will never go on Google Earth without experiencing something of the futility Hans feels as he "travels" to England each night to try to be near to the son who has gone home with Hans's wife. The technology, like his emotions will only let him get so close to family he aches for.

The entire book is what fiction does best: it is new and familiar at the same time. These characters are strangers and different yet just the same as yourself. Some reviewers have made a comparison Fitzgeralds's Gatsby which is apt. But for me, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland conjured up EM Forster's admonition in Howard's End: "Just connect....connect!".

Reading this novel gave me great pleasure. In contrast to its plain cover, this marvelous novel, written in mellifluous and elegant prose, is complex; its world sprawling and vast, with mind-boggling depth. After reading only two pages, I found myself charmed by its narrator's voice, and my mind glued to its world.

On the surface it is the story of its narrator, a banker named Hans van den Broek , born and raised in Netherlands, and working in London. While working in London in a bank, he meets an Englishwoman named Rachel and marries her. They have a son named Jake. In 1990's, they relocate to New York and live in TriBeCa. After the terrorist attack on the Word Trade Center on 9/11, however, they relocate again, and decide to live in the Chelsea Hotel. But Rachel's fear of another terrorist attack and the toxic political atmosphere in the United States create stress in their marriage, and the stress in turn compels Rachel to move with her son, once again, back to London.

Underneath this story, there is another story about a Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon. Ramkissoon is a shady character. He runs a fraudulent and illegal numbers racket. But like many men, even a man from the under-world, he has big ambitions and a dream of starting a world-class cricket field and cricket club in Staten Island and of turning cricket into a national sport in America.

The third story inter-woven with the other two is the story of the game cricket itself and its ardent players at the Staten Island Cricket Club, immigrants from countries such as Sri Lanka, Trinidad, Bahamas, and other tropical countries. Mr. O'Neill weaves the three strands into a lovely braid, his lyrical prose serving as an adornment, like a rope of fragrant jasmine that often adorns a braid in tropical lands.

The most striking feature of this novel, without a doubt, is Mr. O'Neill's elegant and flowing prose, smooth and free from jarring edges and ripples, and as lovely as the very best I have read in my fifty years of romance with the English language: "The day was thick as a jelly, with a hot, glassy atmosphere and no wind, not even a breeze from the Kill of Kull, which flows less than two hundred yards from Walker Park and separates Staten Island from New Jersey. Far away, in the south, was the mumbling of thunder. It was the kind of barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows cast by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe, yearn even for those days when you play cricket wearing two sweaters under a cold sky patched here and there by a blue tatter -- enough to make a sailor's pants, as my mother used to say."

Mr. O'Neill's command over the English language is such that his long sentences have the miraculous property of never annoying the reader. In fact, they tickle the reader's mind and induce great pleasure.