When Hans van den Broek, the Dutch narrator of Joseph O'Neill's masterful new novel "Netherland" meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian trickster on the make, he's led - albeit reluctantly at first - toward a new and more expansive life.

For Hans, a prosperous financial analyst, the move to New York has brought with it an unexpected and prolonged unhappiness for the first time in his life. Then, moving uptown to the Chelsea Hotel in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, his wife tells him she wants to return to London, taking their young son.

It's devastating news. Cast adrift for the first time in his life, Hans' unlikely friendship with Chuck slowly reorientates him, brings him back to himself, and shows him a teeming city within the city whose existence astounds him.

The immigrant experience, on the surface so different to his own, quietly reveals all the generations who have come before him. Unlikely friendships can transform your life, he discovers, and charting unfamiliar territory for the first time the beating pulse of the great city reinvigorates his own.

It's perhaps unsurprising that O'Neill should be so attuned to the crosscurrents and hyphenated identities that New York City specializes in. Raised by an Irish father and a Turkish mother, he was born in Cork, raised in Holland and attended college at Cambridge. For an Irishman, all of these divergent strands lead to another thoroughly remarkable development - Joseph O'Neill loves cricket.

"It's a slightly comic spectacle," O'Neill tells the Irish Voice. "But it's also visually arresting and rather beautiful. The white flares on the green.

"Cricket is a sport in nature. The Irish eye has been interested in the spectacle of cricket certainly as long as James Joyce has. Joyce loved to write about it. Samuel Beckett loved to play it - and would have played on that field in Trinity College many times. In Joyce's Portrait of the Artist there are memorable cricket moments.

"I remember when I was 16 reading that book for the first time. Those sounds he described were incongruous. He heard the pit pat pong of cricket being played, like water dripping - he hears it and he thinks about something - and I remember first being alerted to the effects of literature, in Joyce's description of listening to cricket."

These days O'Neill is a widely celebrated author himself and he lives, like his elusive hero, with his wife and family in the famous Chelsea Hotel. The extraordinary thing about Manhattan, he says, is that it makes room for everyone, and eventually everyone comes.

"I think it should have it's own passport - not the country, the city," he says.

It's a compliment indeed when a man who has traveled so extensively finally discovers a place he wants to call home.

Says O'Neill, "I was born in Cork City. My father's Irish and I think he wanted me to be born there because he was under the mistaken impression that it was a very safe medical environment. My father was a builder of oil refineries and so we'd travel all over the world.

"We went back to Ireland where I was born and where I promptly caught pneumonia. After that we moved on to - it might have been Libya, it might have been Switzerland, Germany or Holland. Before the age of six when we finally settled in Holland I have memories of South Africa, Mozambique, Iran, Turkey, and other countries which I can't remember."

O'Neill was brought up under the impression that he was Irish. He had an Irish passport. He was always referring to or imagining himself in an Irish context.

"I had no alternative," he says. "I mean, there was Turkey as well but the Turkish family my mother belonged to was itself part of a tiny Christian community there which was isolated from the main sweep of Turkish society. I was on the margin of the margins, everything was marginal."

Until he came to New York, where it turned out that lots of people had similar hyphenated backgrounds and the city was very hospitable to them.

\"You're not really pressed to label yourself here the way you might be in Ireland or England, or Holland or Turkey," he says.

That outsider's perspective is a creative boon to a writer, and O'Neill employs it deftly, gifting his character Hans with irony that emerges from it.

"Hans is very lost on all sorts of levels. He's lost his mother who has died. She's his only real witness in the world, so he feels unseen," says the author.

"Then his wife leaves him. And of course he's in this foreign country, he's lost his home, he's living in a hotel. And the United States, the country itself, is lost after the 9/11 attacks. There's a national disorientation and there's a private disorientation and he only begins to find his bearings again in this very unlikely place - this cricket field - and with this very unlikely character, Chuck, whom he really has nothing in common with apart from cricket. But he begins to make sense of the world again through both of them."

The longing for a home, for his wife and son, for his dead mother, for his vanishing youth - all are explored and come to terms with on the cricket field (itself a thing so marginal that it's barely there). Hans has come to play, and that impulse and action restores the deepest part of himself.

At every turn O'Neill thinks and expresses himself like a poet and so his cricket field becomes a portal to the themes of the book and the character himself.

Says O'Neill, "In Hans' case cricket is a strange portal to his youth, to a sense of belonging that he no longer has, now that his mother is dead and now that his youth is behind him. He's a giant infant this guy. He feels very comfortable playing - men like being playful - and always relish a structure that authorizes them to play.

"On the cricket field you're getting away from the wife and the kids and the job and the pressures. It's this special zone where you can play and feel free, where identity is not really an issue - he's a cricketer, he's a batter. That's his identity, one of the guys, that's a happy thing to be. All of the guys are in the same boat, economically many of them lead much more challenging lives, and so for them this game is a wonderful interlude."

The zone of cricket is at the boundary, the margins of American identity. It's where America stops and the rest of the world begins.

"I think that's why Americans have found this book so interesting," says O'Neill. "Because I think they're ready after eight years of Bush - it's been such a confining experience that there's a kind of appetite for anything that expands the dimensions of the world."

Speaking of the remarkable critical response the book has inspired - his prose has been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald's, and the novel has been compared to The Great Gatsby - O'Neill is philosophical.

"I just think, standing back from it for a second, I don't want to misinterpret it. I've had reasonable reviews before. I just feel there's something else going on. There's a zeitgeist thing going on.

"If this book had come out four years ago it might have been appreciated on an aesthetic level, but I don't think it would have quite the kind of impact."

"Netherland" by Joseph O'Neill is published by Patheon Books.