Playing in Staten Island
Would you read a book on cricket written by an Irishman, raised in Netherlands, educated at Cambridge, now living in New York?
Nishi Narayanan
25-Feb-2013
Would you read a book on cricket written by an Irishman, raised in Netherlands, educated at Cambridge, now living in New York?
Joseph O’Neill's third novel, Netherland, is the story of Hans van den Broek, a Dutch investment banker working in New York, who after the 9/11 attacks finds himself exiled to the Chelsea Hotel. After Hans’s British wife leaves him and takes their child back to England, he finds solace in an unlikely friendship with a Trinidadian wheeler-dealer named Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreams of starting a pro cricket league in New York. And he finds a second home in the subculture of New York cricket, a world at once exotic and familiar to him from his own cricketing days in The Hague. Read about it in the New York Times:
New York cricket is “bush cricket,” one of the characters in the book complains, played on wickets of cocoa mat instead of grass and on weedy, substandard pitches, where to score a run you need to bat the ball in the air instead of elegantly along the fast ground of a proper pitch. But it has a charm of its own and is played with unusual devotion, in remote corners of the city, by a surprisingly large number of people unable or unwilling to shed their cricketing heritage.
Nishi Narayanan is a staff writer at ESPNcricinfo