RaveThe Tampa Bay TimesNow along comes Joseph O'Neill with a subtler, quieter tale of New York after the towers fell. Elegant, luminous and moving, Netherland tells the story of a shaken city, an imploding marriage and a man's struggle to connect with fellow human beings ... In O'Neill's deft hands, cricket becomes a well-wrought metaphor for an unknown history (Benjamin Franklin played cricket) and an invisible population ... O'Neill is one smart novelist, slyly constructing Hans as a Henry James innocent, only this naive protagonist is not an American yahoo encountering European sophistication but a European lost in the imperial city of the 21st century, trying to navigate its tricky ethics, sexual conventions and social intricacies ... Like one of those deceptively simple landscape paintings by Bruegel the Elder, Netherland contains multitudes of meaning.
