Joseph O’Neill: Bowled over by the fantastic

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“Think fantastic,” urges the charismatic Chuck Ramkissoon, the shady but genial Trinidadian entrepreneur in Joseph O’Neill’s prize-winning novel “Netherland.” “My motto is, Think fantastic.”

O’Neill appears to have heeded Chuck’s ambitious advice as he wrote it. What could be more fantastic, more bold, more — let’s face it — potentially “crazy” than writing The Great American Cricket Novel 12 years after one’s last novel was published?

Maybe this: When President Barack Obama told a New York Times reporter that he was reading “Netherland,” sales for the PEN/Faulkner Award winner increased by double digits, and Vintage moved up the release date of the paperback. (Obama later told Newsweek the book was “fascinating.”)

“It’s very odd,” says O’Neill of the idea that POTUS is reading his work. “Really, the president is a quasi-fictional character. It’s all pure hearsay, the existence of the president ... and strange to have oneself and one’s book caught up in that story. I suppose you flatter yourself that the story is the history of the United States. That’s the weird, disorienting feeling you get.”

Obama’s interest in “Netherland,” however, makes a certain amount of sense. Yes, cricket, that most puzzling of sports, plays a vital role in this elegant, intelligent novel. But O’Neill, author of the family history “Blood-Dark Track” and the comic novels “This Is the Life” and “The Breezes,” also deals in weighty themes: the effects of multiculturalism; the pressures of globalization; the aftermath of 9/11 on the inhabitants of New York and the rest of the world. It examines the myths and truths of the American dream and what it means, in this troubling century, to be an American.

“I’ve read a lot of books written post-9/11 ... that still feel frightened or apocalyptic,” says author Antonya Nelson, one of the PEN/Faulkner judges. “This book didn’t NOT discuss 9/11, but it was prepared to embrace the wider tonal range in the larger world and at the same moment focus on something so idiosyncratic and perfect, that question posed early in the book: Is the United States ready for a professional cricket league? Sadly, no. It’s such a funny premise, but it’s also apt and slyly political.

O’Neill, Nelson says, “had confidence that his readers would be sophisticated and subtle and ready to read a book that could be comical and moving and playful as well as treating the subject of 9/11 and people’s fear and loneliness.”

The PEN/Faulkner puts O’Neill in heady company: Philip Roth, John Updike, E.L. Doctorow are previous winners. Critics have also compared “Netherland” to “The Great Gatsby,” with its outsider narrator (Hans van den Broek, a Dutch-born equities analyst living in New York’s Chelsea Hotel by way of London, separated from his wife and young son) and its modern-day, multicultural Gatsby (Ramkissoon, who sells kosher sushi, runs numbers and revels in his grandiose plan to build a cricket stadium, among other schemes). Hans is devastated by his wife’s desertion: “My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.” The likable Ramkissoon is a welcome distraction, even when he skirts the edge of the law.

The comparison to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is flattering but makes O’Neill a bit nervous.

“I’m slightly wary about putting those two books next to each other,” he says. “I’m not going to come out of it well. ‘Gatsby’ is regarded by many as the seminal American novel of the 20th century, so obviously one is reluctant to invite comparisons! But I must acknowledge that debt. I was influenced by ‘Gatsby’ to a degree I didn’t realize until I was halfway through the book, by which point my book was significantly different to accept the possibility that the plots are similar. They’re even similar in perspective and mood, with narrators, outsiders who come to New York and leave sadder but wiser men.”

Like his narrator, O’Neill was primarily raised in Holland, though he was born in Cork, Ireland. He spent years as a barrister in London, a job that clearly helped him produce his first novel, “This Is the Life,” a wickedly sly comedy set in London’s legal world. He moved to Manhattan 10 years ago.

“I came because I was married to an American, and she was offered a job here,” he says of his wife Sally Singer, an editor at Vogue. “We came, much like Hans, with the idea we’d stay for a couple of years and then go back, but we stayed. I really feel very happy as a New Yorker.”

Like poor brooding Hans, the couple lives in the Chelsea Hotel with their three sons. And like Hans, O’Neill plays cricket with the Staten Island Cricket Club. The sport, he says, is “synonymous with summer. In the northern hemisphere, summer is magical reprieve from rain and darkness and cold. You’re sort of spoiled in Florida! Cricket is an emotional thing. It’s all connected with memory and unfinished business.”

One last comparison: Like Hans, O’Neill weathered 9/11 and its aftermath. Those tragic events color “Netherland” and its characters, although O’Neill began work on the book long before they happened.

At first, “the idea for the book was reasonably shapeless,” O’Neill says. “It was conceived primarily as a book about cricket, a world to which I had exclusive access in regards to the literary classes. I just thought there was a story there, and you find the story as you write. But I hadn’t gone far down that trail when 9/11 happened. And it becomes impossible to ignore that subject if you’re writing about New York and American identity. It became compulsory to write about it. I couldn’t dodge the ongoing unfolding of events. That was one of the reasons it took so long.”

O’Neill feels keenly the differences in American and European identity. Hans muses on the subject this way: “Londoners remain in the business of rowing their boats gently down the stream… . In New York, self hood’s hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks; that you might have no climbing boots to hand was beside the point.”

“The American dream trajectory is not, I’ve discovered, a merely fictional or literary notion,” O’Neill says. “If you were present for the election, you realized that Obama and all the presidential candidates talked about the American dream as a very real kind of theme of American life. It’s a tradition I was drawn to because it’s a wide-ranging, big view of the world and human life, whereas, as Hans points out, in London, in Europe, people have a much smaller view of human possibility. There, it’s all about fine tuning your experiences and managing ironic resignation to the question of being alive. Irony doesn’t really characterize the American experience.”