Like his narrator, O'Neill was primarily raised in Holland, though he was born in Cork, Ireland. He spent years as a barrister in London, a job that clearly helped him produce his first novel, This Is the Life, a wickedly sly comedy set in London's legal world. He moved to Manhattan 10 years ago.

''I came because I was married to an American, and she was offered a job here,'' he says of his wife Sally Singer, an editor at Vogue. ``We came, much like Hans, with the idea we'd stay for a couple of years and then go back, but we stayed. I really feel very happy as a New Yorker.''

Like poor brooding Hans, the couple lives in the Chelsea Hotel with their three sons. And like Hans, O'Neill plays cricket with the Staten Island Cricket Club. The sport, he says, is ``synonymous with summer. In the northern hemisphere, summer is magical reprieve from rain and darkness and cold. You're sort of spoiled in Florida! Cricket is an emotional thing. It's all connected with memory and unfinished business.''

One last comparison: Like Hans, O'Neill weathered 9/11 and its aftermath. Those tragic events color Netherland and its characters, although O'Neill began work on the book long before they happened.

At first, ''the idea for the book was reasonably shapeless,'' O'Neill says. ``It was conceived primarily as a book about cricket, a world to which I had exclusive access in regards to the literary classes. I just thought there was a story there, and you find the story as you write. But I hadn't gone far down that trail when 9/11 happened. And it becomes impossible to ignore that subject if you're writing about New York and American identity. It became compulsory to write about it. I couldn't dodge the ongoing unfolding of events. That was one of the reasons it took so long.''

AMERICAN CHARACTER

O'Neill feels keenly the differences in American and European identity. Hans muses on the subject this way: ``Londoners remain in the business of rowing their boats gently down the stream. . . . [I]n New York, self hood's hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks; that you might have no climbing boots to hand was beside the point.''

''The American dream trajectory is not, I've discovered, a merely fictional or literary notion,'' O'Neill says. ``If you were present for the election, you realized that Obama and all the presidential candidates talked about the American dream as a very real kind of theme of American life. It's a tradition I was drawn to because it's a wide-ranging, big view of the world and human life, whereas, as Hans points out, in London, in Europe, people have a much smaller view of human possibility. There, it's all about fine tuning your experiences and managing ironic resignation to the question of being alive. Irony doesn't really characterize the American experience.''

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