The extract of Netherland's Hans looking at Chuck's cricket field from the satellite-enabled perspective of Google Maps with which Joseph O'Neill initiated this conversation is a vivid representation of the some of the contemporary and complex ways in which individuals connect with places, myriad connected and distinct patches of earth across memory, time, and space. In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), the anthropologist and cultural critic Arjun Appadurai identifies these border-crossing (post-national?--a term I resist) technological, economic, linguistic, communal, and cultural sites of disconnection and re-connection as a series of interlocking dimensions, as dynamic, shifting, evolving, unfolding processes.

Appadurai tries to examine the forces of globalization (he uses the term "global flows") on people and communities, cultural representations (for example, games like cricket, novels or Bollywood cinema), international and local economies, and politics. He uses the terms ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes to highlight the fluid and intersecting ways in which people, money, styles, languages, ideologies and belief systems travel, flow, and collide (acts of terror are an example of such collisions) and cross-pollinate. Appadurai uses "scapes" as a way to look at places and how they connect between and beyond national borders. What I especially appreciate about his examination of the material, economic, and cultural processes of global flows and exchanges is that Appadurai complicates the too easy, too Manichean globalization is good/globalization is evil, free trade/fair trade, right/left debates. This may be a too-academic-mouthful with which to begin, but I think that O'Neill's Netherland explores some of these ideas, habits, and material realities of contemporary mobility in very accessible ways. Netherland's vision of America is shaped by the movements of the privileged (Hans and Rachel) and the labor-seeking, by legal and illicit enterprise, and multiple and shifting, vibrant and exhausted notions of the American Dream, which for Chuck is about making money and about embracing and celebrating cricket's internationalism, elegance, balance of chance and risk, and its discipline and ritual. Hans thinks, "I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice." Chuck's romanticism is also internationally inflected, as it is infectious.

One of the things that I especially appreciated about Netherland was the novel's highlighting of the various historical layers of cultures and communities that comprise a nation in the first place. Just a closer look at one American city highlights some of the myths and fictions that we assign to place, to any place as entirely knowable or even as "ours," as "home." Chuck's guided tour of New York City makes visible all kinds of hidden or forgotten histories of settlement, occupation, relocation, and dislocation--including trauma: land-theft, genocide, self-selected or enforced exile, and loss. He reveals the city's Native American and Dutch settler origins (Chuck reminds Hans that the word Yankee itself "came from that simplest of Dutch names--Jan"), and he immerses Hans in its profuse ethnic Asian, South Asian, Jewish, Russian, Afro-Caribbean, Latino, etc., etc., enclaves. I love the description of the Coney Island scene in which Hans observes a "bunch of South African Jews, in full sectarian regalia, watching televised cricket with a couple of Rastafarians in the front office of a Pakistani-run lumberyard." That colorful small scene represents various kinds of movements, diasporic relocations, affiliations, and habits of identification (religious, cultural, stylistic--the Rastafarians could be any race or ethnicity, for example. There's this beautiful coffee table photobook of Rastafarians and the Rastas depicted range from Afro-Caribbean to Japanese and beautiful Nordic Rastas, dreadlocks and all).

I think that Netherland explores both the artificiality and mutability of national borders and their staying power, as well. The U. S. government's militaristic response to 9/11 (which causes Hans' wife Rachel to anxiously and angrily flee the U.S.) and the rhetoric of "the war on terror" can be understood as a defensive re-articulation of a national identity ("us" against the amorphous "them"); borders are hardened and rigidified as are the policies designed to police and protect. And Netherland also acknowledges of the dreadful realities of the borderless world--terrorism is one of those ideoscapes--a dangerously appealing set of traveling and exported belief systems (religious absolutists, white nationalists, ethnic separatists)--to which Appadurai refers.

Rachel tells Hans that she "had definitely decided not to return to the United States, at least not before the end of the Bush administration or any successor administration similarly intent on military and economic domination of the world" (95). While her outrage at the Iraq war and U.S. policies is understandable, her abandonment of the U.S. disables her from seeing and learning some of the things that Hans discovers about his additional home--that the city has its beauty, its fragile communities; that cities' cosmopolitanism is a kind of difficult treasure, one that sometimes is hard to appreciate and recognize. On the cricket field Hans hears the vernacular poetry of world English, a language that despite its history of colonial imposition/interruption, instruction and correction, still has the power to unite. He notes that, "Most of the home team appeared to be Indians. They spoke a rough English, to my ears barely comprehensible, that I took to be foreign to them. It wasn't until later that I understood they were West Indians, not Asian, and their speech--a spiky dialect of grammatical shortcuts and jewellike expressions I'd never heard before--was conducted in their first and only language." That scene is for me matched in its hopefulness--Hans listens and learns--as is the scene depicting the players' prayers before the game:

Before the start of play, one of our team, Ramesh, drew us into circle for a prayer. We huddled with arms around one another's shoulders--nominally, three Hindus, three Christians, a Sikh and four Muslims. "Lord," said the Reverend Ramesh, as we called him, "we thank You for bringing us here together today for this friendly game. We ask that you keep us safe and fit during the match today. We ask for clement weather. We ask for Your blessing upon this game, Lord." We broke up in a burst of clapping and took to the field (11).

All I can really say in response is that the scene moved me powerfully; it provided a glimmer of hope in what is a wrenching, adult, wise and world-weary, sometimes funny, and clear-sighted examination of 21st century political realities--"our world." And I will also respond to Ramesh's prayer by saying, yeah, Amen.