A review by mhpotter
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

3.0

O'Neill's book interested me for it's 9/11 milieu, but the events of that day are really not central to the story of a man trying to find himself in the wake of a failing marriage. A compelling and enjoyable story, O'Neill however suffers from love of words that complicate and weigh down his narrative. While the story successfully conflates the past and the present, dancing between different temporal threads, the overall narrative strikes as rather messy, the character threads and the overarching narrative becoming unnecessarily tangled and confused. The digressions on the technical aspects of cricket, likewise, seemed unnecessary to the story, perhaps a case of the author's research/experience gaining too much precedence in the actual story being told -- backing materials necessary for creation, but which should have been edited out in the final drafts.