It's not really about cricket at all

Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
New York: Pantheon Books, 2008

Right before I started reading it, I found this Wonkette description of Netherland:

Recall last summer: it was the summer of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, the most important book liked by people wearing the most important-looking glasses. It seems O’Neill has journeyed from that wire-rimmed menagerie of the psyche to Politics & Prose, where all such odysseys of the soul must, and do, eventually terminate.

And I thought to myself, that sounds about how I remember the talk about this book. And while I generally don't wear glasses (current facebook profile pic aside), I figure that since I like the sort of books those people like, it's a good thing I've finally checked this out from the library. Oh, plus, it's a 9/11 book, and I'm kinda fascinated by those. (Like this one and this one.)

But just like it's not really about cricket, it's not really about 9/11. Except it's not not about them either. It's about love and loss and rediscovering oneself. And - and this is what makes it most about 9/11, for me - it is a love story about America, and NYC specifically. What is it about America that keeps pulling people toward it? Why are we a nation of immigrants?

I found Hans a lovely and thoughtful - albeit lost - narrator. It's as though he serves almost entirely as a mirror to hold up the world and the other characters he sees. But anyway, a few of the lovelier observations from Hans:

• Even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become too small to contain my misery.
  
• Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
• I was possibly the only person contained by the apparent world who was unable to see through it.

And, finally, "my secret, almost shameful feeling is that I am out of New York - that New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin." Which reminded me of nothing so much as E.M. Cioran:

All that is not Paris being equal in my eyes, I often regret that wars have spared it. [...] I shall never forgive Paris for having bound me to space, for making me from somewhere.

Which is a lot for a city to shoulder. But if any cities can, they are NYC and Paris. And what of my City of Angels? In what ways is it so much like and unlike the others? Could a different Netherland be set here?