The title of Joseph O'Neill's third novel works on a number of levels. Most obviously, it suggests the birthplace of its narrator, Hans van den Broek, an analyst for a British bank on assignment in New York. But it also describes the desolate state of his marriage to Rachel, an English solicitor who decides to leave her husband and return to Britain in the chaotic days after 9/11. And then there is the patch of Brooklyn lowland where the unhappily single Hans comes to spend his weekends toiling with Chuck Ramkissoon, an immigrant entrepreneur who dreams of turning the weedy field into a world-class cricket pitch. Finally, there is the lowest land of all, the pit a few blocks from Hans's loft where the twin towers once stood.

The story opens soon after the attack. Hans, Rachel and their two-year-old son, Jake, have taken up residence in the Chelsea Hotel, afraid to return home even after the authorities have given the all-clear. The trauma, it seems, has exposed a deep fissure in their marriage: “If there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness ...mornings we woke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself overnight.”

After Rachel and Jake go back to London, the bereft Hans becomes involved in a cricket league - he'd played the sport while a boy in Holland. This brings him into contact with Chuck, a Trinidadian of Indian ancestry, whose motto is “think fantastic”. Chuck's particular fantasy is to create the “New York Cricket Club”, which will feature an 8,000-seat arena where national teams from India, Pakistan, South Africa and Australia can play a game he sees as one of humankind's deepest expressions of civilisation. Chuck's energy rapidly fills the void in Hans's life. “While the country floundered in Iraq, Chuck was running,” he claims. But there is also a dark, potentially criminal underside to Chuck that Hans, whose tendency to “distraction” was one of the chief causes of his marital collapse, is among the last to see.

Netherland is an elegant and occasionally profound book, although O'Neill's attempt to depict the break-up of Hans's marriage through the lens of 9/11 proves more obscuring than clarifying. Because it is never clear that the couple suffers from anything other than a garden-variety marital malaise, the use of the falling towers as the background and prompt to their crisis puts a weight on this strand of the narrative that it doesn't support. Rachel, in particular, feels under-drawn, her behaviour toward Hans hard to fathom.

The author fares much better when dealing with the relationship between Hans and Chuck, representatives of the oldest and newest waves of immigrants to New York. It is easy to see how the awkward, effete Hans, who by his own admission is “a bystander”, can be drawn in by Chuck, whose conviction that America remains a land of possibility and renewal has not been dented, even by 9/11. In fact, as he remembers working at an emergency triage centre for pets in the days after the towers fell, Chuck admits that “for many of us it was one of the happiest times of our life”.

This sort of optimism cannot go unpunished for long in Bush's America. Hans's gradual understanding that the American dream has a dark underside for striving outsiders such as Chuck is particularly well rendered; for example, when Hans emerges onto the New York streets after a nightmarish tangle with the city's bureaucracy while trying to get a driver's licence. “I was seized for the first time by a nauseating sense of America, my gleaming adopted country, under the secret actuation of unjust, indifferent powers. The rinsed taxis, hissing over fresh slush, shone like grapefruits; but if you looked down into the space between the road and the undercarriage, where icy matter stuck to pipes and water streamed down the mud flaps, you saw a foul mechanical dark.”

Chuck's tragedy is that he never really sees this darkness, never understands that America might value his energy while having no time for his dreams. Or, as a would-be investor in his grand venture explains, “there's a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket”.

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
Fourth Estate £14.99 pp247 Buy from Books First £13.49 with free delivery

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