Sunday Book Chat

‘Netherland’ by Joseph O’Neill will be the topic of the Rockport Public Library Sunday Book chat on Jan. 18 at 2:00 p.m.

The main character is a Dutch-transplanted Londoner working in New York City. After 9/11 he and wife abandon their downtown loft, and soon she takes their son back to London.

Feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, he stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. He befriends a Trinidadian entrepreneur who dreams of making cricket a great American sport. The friend introduces him to an ‘other’ New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality. The unlikely friendship rises and falls in tandem with his marriage, which falls and then, gradually, rises again.

The book provides a picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger and brilliantly achieved ambition: the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st century America from an outsider’s vantage point and the complicated relationship between the American dream and particular dreamers.

The Book Chat is an informal discussion of titles of interest to a general audience. New members are always welcome and the library is handicapped accessible. Copies of the book are available at the library and Toad Hall Bookstore.