INTERVIEW:New York has inspired countless writers and artists, but Irish-born author Joseph O'Neill is surely the first to find inspiration in the city's low-profile cricket scene. The resulting novel, however, is already being hailed as a post-9/11 classic, writes Belinda McKeon
'LOOK AT THIS," says Joseph O'Neill, standing at a desk in the livingroom of his apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. He picks up a manuscript, a hefty volume, and we browse through the pages together. It's all here. Crime. Punishment. Pride. Prejudice. War. Peace. And a Tyrannosaurus rex.
This is Dino, the latest in a series of self-published (as in self-coloured, self-pencilled and self-stapled) graphic novels by O'Neill's eldest son, Malachy, who's eight. For readers who thunder their way through Dino and need another fix, Malachy has several future projects on the boil; advertisements and press releases about his upcoming titles are postered all over the apartment walls. "Coming Soon: Warren Dangerous" reads one; "Moonlight", purrs another, adding the enticement: "Be a hero and a villain at the same time."
Meanwhile, where the antics of Kenneth Storm: Agent Zeroand his crew are concerned, "Their plan wasn't a very good idea."
Cute? It's downright terrifying. O'Neill jnr's back-catalogue is already three times the size of his father's, and that's just counting the evidence currently scattered around the apartment, a light-filled two-bedroom over West 23rd Street. Still, O'Neill snr has at last got something with which to square up to the competition - reviews for his third novel, Netherland, published this month by Fourth Estate, have been, in his own words, "embarrassingly favourable". The New York Times Book Reviewawarded Netherland its prestigious front-page spot and the Review's senior editor, Dwight Garner, praised it as the "wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate" work of fiction yet written about life in post-9/11 New York (and London). O'Neill's book, wrote Garner, had "more life inside it than 10 very good novels". James Wood in the New Yorker, meanwhile, described it as one of the most remarkable post-colonial books he had ever read - and Wood likes his post-colonials.
Such words must have spread like a balm over nerves which, O'Neill admits, were badly jangled by the experience of writing this novel, over seven years, without an agent or publisher in sight, with the time lag since his last novel stretching and stretching, and with everywhere around him the prolific energy of the New York literary world.
O'Neill, who was born in Cork but spent the first years of his life in Africa and Asia and the rest of his childhood and adolescence in Holland (his father built oil refineries), published his first novel, This Is the Life, in 1991, shortly after graduating with a law degree from Cambridge, and followed that book with The Breezes in 1995, by which time he was working as a barrister in London. Soon after the publication in 2001 of his acclaimed family memoir, Blood-Dark Track, a riveting exploration of the imprisonment of both his grandfathers - one Irish, one Turkish - during the second World War, O'Neill switched to writing full-time. It became clear to him, he says, that "if what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it".
But that recognition, he found, was only half the battle - if even that. Netherland has been a full seven years in the making. Five years into the process, he decided that he had no idea how to write the novel, and called his wife, Vogueeditor Sally Singer, to tell her that he was abandoning it, and chalking the last half-decade up to bitter experience. "But then as soon as I gave up," he says, "I suddenly started to understand what my book was about."
What is Netherland about? For starters: cricket, New York, marriage, fatherhood, masculinity, self. Or, a little more specifically, Netherland is about a Dutch-born New Yorker whose marriage falls apart soon after the 9/11 attacks, who finds himself living without his wife and his young son in the Chelsea Hotel, walled in by oddball neighbours and by a newly ominous city, and who finds release, and respite, but also a whole new raft of complications, in a hidden alcove of New York life: its cricket scene. For there is such a scene even in New York, O'Neill's Hans van den Broek discovers, and it is a pathway into another New York: New York at its edges, New York in its undergrowth, the New York which is all but invisible from Manhattan's polished heights.
Netherland's narrative plunges into the immigrant communities of Brooklyn and Queens, surfacing with portraits and set-pieces that sparkle with life and with meaning; the writing is in full possession of this vibrant and byzantine world, through which O'Neill's narrator - baffled by his wife, lonely for his son, and shaken by his city - travels fitfully, his fears and his longings rattling around in his kit bag.
The book's deep knowledge of these neighbourhoods, and of the city's patchy cricket world, is the real deal: O'Neill is a member of a cricket club on Staten Island, where he plays "most Sundays"; an experience that opened doors into "various kinds of nooks and crannies of Brooklyn, and to a love and appreciation of all of that," he says. Joining the Staten Island club showed him "this whole marginal world, West Indians and Asians, which was simply not visible to the mainstream culture", and which quickly grew, for him, from a curiosity into an obsession, from something to do on Sundays into something about which he knew he had to write a novel. That was in 2001. And inevitably, what happened in New York that September changed the type of novel which he knew he had to write.
"After 9/11, the whole notion of writing about New York cricket, in which I knew there was a book somewhere, became fused with what had happened to New York City," he explains. "And the meaning of the cricket began to change until I began to see cricket as a kind of metaphor for that which is not seen by America. And obviously, that is part of the challenge that faces Americans now, the problem of the extent to which they are able to see the world and the world is able to see them, and the terms on which they are able to do that."
The accomplishment of Netherland as a post-9/11 novel, though, is in its lack of self-consciousness about the subject, and about the aftermath. The war in Iraq is a shadow-presence in Hans's city, just as it is in O'Neill's city; while he puts angry polemic into the mouth of Hans's wife at one stage, lacing such polemic through the book itself was not something he wanted to do. "I'm trying to write about life," he says. "I'm not trying to write about Iraq. So to the degree that Iraq is around, Iraq comes in, in this guy's life."
Before deciding to devote himself to a full-time career as a writer, O'Neill worked as a lawyer, mainly in London, where his dealings with the cases of Trinidadian death-row prisoners stirred an interest in that country. Many of his Staten Island club-mates hail from Trinidad, and so too does Netherland's most arresting character - the wheeler-dealer Chuck, who dreams of building a world-class cricket stadium in Brooklyn. Something else which gave O'Neill a foothold in authenticity was his family's tenure in Flatbush, a melting-pot Brooklyn neighbourhood with grit ground firmly into the soles of its shoes, for which they left Manhattan and the Chelsea Hotel in 2003.
Flatbush, unlike some prettier and more fashionable parts of Brooklyn, hauls no airs and graces - although the O'Neills were hardly roughing it: the draw to Flatbush in the first place was a beautiful, six-bedroom Victorian house. Two more sons had come along - Pascal, now seven, and Oscar, five - and the apartment in the Chelsea was getting crowded. "We just thought, we have to have an adult size," says O'Neill. "Our life must assume an adult size. And so we went to Brooklyn to this extremely adult, adulty-sized house."
They bought and renovated the place, much to the delight of their neighbours, who knew a real estate boon - in the shape of a Vogue editor - when they saw one. There were lots of housewarming gifts. But ultimately, the distance from 4 Times Square became too much for Singer, "an urban creature", as her husband describes her. And so it was back to Manhattan, and back to the Chelsea, because the Chelsea, after all, was home. Albeit home with a slightly larger square footage than before, thanks to the management allowing the O'Neills to knock a wall into another apartment and make a new bedroom and bathroom for themselves.
They've rented that apartment ever since, and hope to for the foreseeable future, O'Neill says. He and Singer first moved there in 1998, when they were both newly arrived from England, with their two cats; O'Neill had no credit history in the US, and Singer's had been almost erased as a consequence of living abroad for so long, so they were finding it very difficult to rent an apartment until the Chelsea, with its arthritic elevators and its rock-star ghosts, presented itself as a possibility.
"The whole place is magical," O'Neill says of it now. "It's a whole kind of story unto itself. You're in this village; you have a village life in the middle of the city, and the villagers are friendly and fascinating."
And often, of course, famous; while the O'Neills have lived there, Didi Ramone, Debbie Harry and Ethan Hawke have been among their co-residents. Not that O'Neill was on morning coffee terms with any of them; his favourite Chelsea story centres around the time he and baby Malachy were invited over for a cuppa by the late playwright Arnold Weinstein, who lived across the hall, and ended up spending the evening with Arthur Miller and friends.
But the Chelsea is "just a really basic, authentic place" for O'Neill and his family, he says; it's just home. And his sons treat it just like any kids treat the place they call home. O'Neill laughs when I ask him whether he might possibly know anybody like the three young boys who are Hans's neighbours in Netherland, the boys who run wild in the hallways with tricycles and balls and trains. "Very possibly, yes," he allows. The hall is a clatter of skateboards, and a Lego castle and a Lego hotel - looking uncannily, in fact, like the Chelsea Hotel - stand proudly on the livingroom sideboard. Photographs of the boys, floppy-haired and clear-eyed, are everywhere, many taken by photographer neighbours in the hotel.
Stacks of international fashion magazines and the apartment's vintage-savvy décor are the only clue to Singer's dayjob - that, and a wall covered with marvellous-looking shoes, tucked somewhere between the boys' room and the hall-cum-library.
"Ah yes. Our glamorous life," O'Neill says dryly, when I ask him about life as a Vogue husband. Right, so it's not exactly life as a footballer's wife, but it must have its moments? Parties? Freebies? Marc Jacobs kipping on the sofa?
"Well, let's see," he says. "Every night, we get dressed up in our Balenciaga, and in my case . . . um, Helmut Lang?" He pauses. "No, he doesn't really work anymore, does he?"
I don't know, Mr Vogue; you tell me.
"I have about three pairs of trousers," he says. "You know, if even that." The fact that his wife was in the fashion business came as something of a surprise to him, he says. He met Singer in England, when she was his editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and in their first years together she worked as an editor at the London Review of Books. A features post at British Voguefollowed.
"And then," says O'Neill, "she confesses to me that she is in fact a fashion addict, and that she has been offered a job at Elle."
Singer is now fashion director at American Vogue, and a little Google-stalking hints that the glamorous life is, in fact, alive and well chez Singer-O'Neill - shoots for Wallpaper* and the New York Timesstyle section, and party guests such as fashion designers Alber Elbaz and Narciso Rodriguez.
But the whole notion of the glamorous life is "circumspect", says O'Neill. "Ours is a family life with three children. Circumstantially, one life can appear more glamorous than another, but it all depends what your idea of glamour is. My idea of glamour now is a kind of waking up somewhere, you know, a sort of run-down apartment with no children . . . glamorous is just shorthand for enviable, really. And everyone finds different things enviable."
Like a rare rave from James Wood, for example, or that front page on the New York Times Book Review, with its beautiful accompanying image, a screenprinted shadow of a jetplane over a cricket field. Funny they should have chosen that. "I was flying over New York yesterday," says O'Neill, "and I could have sworn I saw a cricket stadium being built, this huge oval with a cricket middle."
Just like Chuck's longed-for-but-never-gained stadium, just like the novel's magical version of the American dream. "So maybe it's happening," shrugs O'Neill, "which is just bizarre."
Netherland is published by Fourth Estate, £14.99