Born in Ireland and raised in the Netherlands, novelist Joseph O'Neill practiced law in England for ten years before moving to New York City, where he now writes for The Atlantic Monthly and plays for the Staten Island Cricket Club. His novel Netherland was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2008.
In this paragraph from Netherland, O'Neill's narrator recalls a cricket game played in a New York City park one summer afternoon. The coordinated words, phrases, and clauses not only advance the action but evoke a mood of increasing tension.
from Netherland
by Joseph O'Neill
The men from St. Kitts batted for just over two hours. Throughout their innings their supporters maintained the usual hullabaloo of laughter and heckling and wisecracks from the field’s east boundary, where they congregated in the leaves’ shadows and drank rum out of paper cups and ate barbecued red snapper and chicken. "Beat the ball!" they shouted, and "The man chucking!" and, raising their arms into the scarecrow pose that signals a wide ball, "Wide, umpire, wide!" Our turn came to bat. As the innings wore on and the game grew tighter and more and more rum was drunk, the musical din started up again from the Toyota, where men had gathered once again, and the shouting of the spectators grew more emotional. In this atmosphere, by no means rare for New York cricket, the proceedings on and off the field became more and more combative. At a certain moment the visitors fell prey to the suspicion, apparently never far from the mind of cricketers in that city, that a conspiracy to rob them of victory was afoot, and the appeals of the fielders ("How’s that, umpire? Ump!") assumed a bitter, disputatious character, and a fight nearly broke out between a fielder in the deep and an onlooker who had said something.
Selected Works by Joseph O'Neill:
- This Is The Life, a novel (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1991)
- The Breezes, a novel (Faber & Faber, 1996)
- Blood-Dark Track: A Family History, nonfiction (Granta Books, 2001)
- Netherland, a novel (Pantheon Books, 2008)
Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill, is published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate (2008) and in the United States by Pantheon Books (2008).
