Netherland

Happy New Year’s EVE!  Getting close to another new year beginning.  Hope you all will begin to start your long list of resolutions.  Before we go there, let me tell you about the last book I read in 2010. Well didn’t end on a high note for sure.  Today was Netherland by Joseph  O’Neill, a story of a Dutch man, Hans van den Broek, and his life in NYC after 9/11.  How his life is changed by his wife’s decision to uproot his son after the World Trade Center bombing to London and finding meaning as an outsider in the US.  While the writing is quite good and witty at times, the story didn’t go anywhere for me.  In the reviews that I read on the book, Hans' life is compared to Gatsby… really?  While I appreciated the struggle he had in maintaining relationships after his wife left the country, didn’t find it to even be in the realm of Gatsby.  The storyline of finding male friendship through playing cricket and being introduced to Chuck Ramkissoon, a man from Trinidad trying to bring cricket to the states, was a good diversion until Ramkissoon was found dead in a canal in Brooklyn.  Too many unfinished and unconnected story lines here.  While we don’t always need things to be tied together, might help to have some closure.  The ending left me wanting for more, like an ending.  The wife story line was bizarre and went nowhere for me.  While the book has been hailed as an award winning story, it wasn’t for me.  How did Rachel (his wife) come back to this guy, after the Chef and other guys?  Maybe being an “insider” to NYC makes this a misunderstood book for me.  I listened to this one on tape and needed to go back and re-listen to the last chapter saying, is that it???  A "skip it" for me.  Hope next year brings me to some better reads.