Here’s what puts me slightly off Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, the It Book of this year’s Booker longlist: it’s a dry buzz, not a wet one. Yes, this tale of a Trini hustler named Khamraj ‘Chuck’ Ramkissoon with a dream of building a grand cricket stadium in Queens is written with hyperverbal virtuosity. Yes, its adult prose is head and shoulders above most novels this year and makes the Foer generation sound like droolers in a sandbox. Yes, it gets deeper into New Amsterdam than did Salman Rushdie in Fury, exposing the ethnic and literal aviaries of the outer boroughs. Yes, it’s drenched in desiana, from Pakistani cabbies to ‘the great Tendulkar’ to a sojourn in Kerala with a happier marital outcome than that of Sita Sings the Blues.

But Hans van der Broek, a well-paid Manhattan oil industry analyst wandering in the netherland of a crumbling marriage, is an upper-class control freak. Reading this novel is like listening to Stewie from Family Guy without the barbed humor — though a dry wit eventually seeps through. It’s written in hyper-first person narrative, almost a Reluctant Fundamentalist-style real-time monologue. You could imagine Hans unleashing the entire book in a late-night rant at a bar, a tipsy but always in control ex-barrister from whom you learn much, with whom you connect little.

Netherland is very centered in the real, marking time by actual events like the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Despite the narrator’s class swagger — he has the urge to tell the man who’s shagging his wife to ‘get back’ to him ‘when he’s clearing ten thousand dollars a day’ — it achieves a multiculti gloss simply by capturing New York’s ethnic milieu with photorealistic accuracy. Hans’ neighbors at the Chelsea Hotel include a gay Turk in angel attire whose family bankrolls him under the thin fiction of higher education. Hans is so planted in that which is concrete that he constantly lawyers his legal exposure from his friendship with Chuck, who may have dragged him into some unseemly business.

O’Neill performs an interesting bisection with the character of Chuck, who provides most of the storytelling and flava needed to sustain a 300-page novel while the somber narrator slowly comes unstuck. Chuck is the Magical Trini of the novel, not in the sense of a shallow, racially stereotyped savior — he’s far too well-written a character — but as one who is transparently the author’s voice. Toward the end his monologues are far more literary-textual than you’d expect of any spoken language, let alone someone in his line of business.Swanning figures converge on the batsman and scatter back, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors

Typically for an ex-barrister, a fraternal profession, O’Neill rises to his first real poetry in a description of sport. The narrator describes why the lack of a good pitch changes the nature of American cricket:

… the pitch at Walker Park is made of… pale sandy baseball clay, not red cricket clay, and its bounce cannot be counted on to stay true for long; and… it lacks variety and complexity. (Wickets consisting of earth and grass are rich with possibility: only they can fully challenge and reward a bowler’s repertoire of cutters and spinners and bouncers and seamers…)

What all these recreational areas have in common is a rank outfield that largely undermines the art of batting, which is directed at hitting the ball along the ground with that elegant variety of strokes a skilful batsman will have spent years trying to master and preserve: the glance, the hook, the cut, the sweep, the cover drive… Play such orthodox shots in New York and the ball will more than likely halt in the tangled, weedy groundcover… Consequently… the batsman is forced to smash the ball into the air… fielding is distorted too, since the fielders are quickly removed from their infield positions… to distant stations on the boundary, where they listlessly linger. It’s as if baseball were a game about home runs…

This degenerate version of the sport - bush cricket… inflicts an injury that is aesthetic… 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 towards 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…

Chuck recites a dirge for NYC cricket:You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man? Put on the white clothes of the cricketer

Before the start of play, one of our team, Ramesh, drew us into a circle for a prayer. We huddled with arms round one another’s shoulders - nominally, three Hindus, three Christians, a Sikh and four Muslims. ‘Lord,’ said the Reverend Ramesh, as we called him, ‘we thank You for bringing us here today for this friendly game. We ask that You keep us safe and fit during the match today. We ask for clement weather. We ask for Your blessing upon this game, Lord.’ …

[Chuck:] ‘It doesn’t matter that we have more than one hundred and fifty clubs playing in the New York area. It doesn’t matter that cricket is the biggest, fastest-growing bat-and-ball game in the world. None of it matters. In this country, we’re nowhere. We’re a joke. Cricket? How funny… Every summer the parks of this city are taken over by hundreds of cricketers but somehow nobody notices. It’s like we’re invisible. Now that’s nothing new, for those of us who are black or brown… You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of the cricketer.’

The great Ramkissoon is introduced:

… they made an unusual couple: she, American and white and petite and fair-haired; he, a portly immigrant a decade older and very dark - like Coca-Cola, he would say. His colouring came from his mother’s family, which originated in the south of India somewhere - Madras, was Chuck’s suspicion. He was a descendant of indentured labourers and had little firm information about such things.

Throughout the narrative, O’Neill muses aloud in memorable twists of phrase. Leaving your hometown means consigning friends to memory as surely as if they were actually deceased. A farcical party in the Chelsea Hotel lobby approaches Gary Shteyngart’s wit. It involves a drug dealer, a man renting a dog as a tryout, Mehmet the Turkish angel, and a one-night stand involving pale white Hans whipping his pale black date with his belt, shivering at the undertones. Hans’ estranged wife Rachel tells him she once dated an ‘expert,’ a man who took pride in the athletic and various ways in which he could make a woman come. Hans realizes that the U.S. is no longer the dominant sports market, that India alone could sustain global cricket.

Netherland is a kind of literary unicorn, a very verbal, very male novel — About a Bwoy. Hans deals with his failing relationship in alternating fits of gloom and possessive, Neanderthal rage. In one passage he hits a cricket ball American style, a home-run swing for an aerial sixer, and is mobbed in congratulation. It reminds me of the round of first bumps the first time I benched double plates.

Dudes, recognize.

Here’s a longer excerpt. The Chicago Tribune reveals even more.

NPR catches the Gatsby references. The New Yorker and New York mag dig it. O’Neill talks about how the book is not quite a Gatsby update in the Atlantic.

Some Booker oddsmakers favor Enchantress, others lean toward Netherland.

In the Atlantic and New Yorker, O’Neill once reviewed Zadie’s On Beauty, Kazuo Ishiguro, Indian restaurant Saffron, Trini kitchen Ali’s Roti Shop, and the Ayurveda Café.

Previously: Netherland, Exploding tiger mangoes in the enchanted netherland sea