Although the main character is most likely in his mid-30s, Netherland is a grown-up bildungsroman. These are truly the formative years of an otherwise unreflective man. The tone is tender, nostalgic, fraught and quite masculine. Hans van den Broek is a Dutchman who now lives alone in NYC after his wife and child have left him to return to their life in London. His story takes place in a time trough (between a pre-9/11 life with his family and the floundering years he spends on his own) discovering the subculture of cricket in NYC and living in the reminiscence of his childhood, family and fleeting experiences.
“Some people have no difficulty in identifying with their younger incarnations: Rachel, for example, will refer to episodes from her childhood or college days as if they’d happened to her that very morning. I, however, seem given to self-estrangement. I find it hard to muster oneness with those former selves whose accidents and endeavors have shaped who I am now. The schoolboy at the Gymnasium Haganum; the Leiden student; the clueless trainee executive at Shell; the analyst in London; even the thirty-year-old who flew to New York with his excited young wife: my natural sense is that all are faded, by the by, discontinued.”
“’Love,’ Rachel desperately replied, ‘is such an omnibus word.’ Here was the irony of our continental separation (undertaken, remember, in the hope of clarification): it had made things less clear than ever. By and large, we separators succeeded only in separating our feelings from any meaning we could give them. That was my experience, if you want to talk about experience. I had no way of knowing if what I felt, brooding in New York City, was love’s abstract or love’s miserable leftover. The idea of love was itself separated from meaning. Love? Rachel had gotten it right. Love was an omnibus thronged by a rabble.”
Netherland received accolades from Obama as well as the New York Times (Book of the Year as well as the winner of the Pen/Faulkner award in 2009).
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