A friend's novel

So it was I read that on the cover of the Sunday Book Review there was a review of Netherland by Joseph O'Neill, by Dwight Gardner. It described O'Neill's book as 'the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.'

Netherland looks as if it might top the lot. Here he is on New York cricket: 'This degenerate version of the sport - bush cricket, as Chuck more than once dismissed it - inflicts an injury that is aesthetic as much as anything: the American adaptation is devoid of the beauty of cricket played on a lawn of appropriate dimensions, where the white-clad ring of infielders, swanning figures on the vast oval, again and again converge in unison toward the batsman and again and again scatter back to their starting points, a repetition of pulmonary rhythm, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors.'