NETHERLAND PB

US: Harper Perennial, 2009. Paperback. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans--a ban ker originally from the Netherlands--finds himself marooned among the stran ge occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to re gard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket , where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a c harismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to recon nect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figur e who is part idealist and part operator, introduces Hans to an other New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality. H ans is alternately seduced and instructed by Chuck s particular brand of na ivete and chutzpah--by his ability to a hold fast to a sense of American an d human possibility in which Hans has come to lose faith. Netherland gives us both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger, and brilliantly achieved ambition: the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st century America from an outsider s vantage point, and the complicated relationship between the American dream and the particular dreamers. Most immediately, though, it is the story of one man--of a marriage foundering and recuperating in its mystery and ordinariness, of the shallows and depths of male friendship, of mourning and memory. Joseph O Neill.