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Netherland: A Novel by Joseph O’Neill

What is Netherland, the strange-but-familiar compound that Joseph O’Neill has made the title of his captivating new novel? At its plainest, perhaps, it’s a singular bit of the Netherlands, the country from which the narrator, Hans van den Broek, arrived in the late 1990s, via London, as an equities analyst for a major New York bank. That orderly, tolerant, “providential” country, seen on a map with “its streamer of northern isles” like “a land steaming seaward,” is the deep field of Hans’s memories. The only child of a mother widowed when he was two, he is haunted by scenes from his Dutch childhood and adolescence, which seem to hold the key to his reserved, retentive personality and strangely passive behavior.

Powell’s Books - Review-a-Day - Netherland by Joseph O’neill, reviewed by New York Review of Books.