Customer Rating:  
Summary: A demanding but worthwhile read
Comment: According to the dust jacket the critics loved it. I can see why but found it very demanding. It is not a novel in which plot plays a big part. In fact, it is more an extended meditation on experience - on love,class, fatherhood, friendship,and belonging. But the prose is breathtaking at times, and there are some sections of description and reflection which I won't forget in a hurry and which make it worthwhile in the end.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Appropriately enough, doesn't really get anywhere
Comment: This novel doesn't ever seem to really engage with its supposed central themes - post 9-11 New York and cricket in the American/immigrant experience. Instead, it seems to identify all-too-much with its depressed and isolated protagonist, who seems to spend a surprising amount of time mooching oddly about for a high-flying financier. Despite the hype, this just felt to me like yet another novel about (big letters) The Family. I could happily live the rest of my life without reading about another bloody middle-aged man feeling isolated from his wife and son.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not understated, just overrated...
Comment: Oh dear. Another `important' book about 9/11. Another book with `aching prose' that is, allegedly, `poised and unsettling'. Or so the marketing blurb would have you believe. In fact, this is a dreadfully poor, under-edited work. I'm struggling to imagine the reader who would be satisfied by this book.
Let's get one thing clear: any attempt to link this book to issues about 9/11 are just commercial hype to get you to buy it. It has nothing to do with the Twin Towers - any attempt to connect it as such, is a retrospective attempt to shoehorn something contemporary into a dull, meandering read.
The narrator's stream-of-consciousness is no doubt deliberate, but it is tremendously annoying. The idea within an idea within an idea merely leaves everything elliptical, under-used, over-complicated, and robbed of any currency, wit, or impact. In fact, the absence of impact is one of the many flaws. The main character, Hans, is a drippy doormat who seems incapable of rousing himself to any kind of emotion at all. Wife leaving you? So what. Hate your job? Ho-hum. There is absolutely nothing that will gain this character's passionate attention, and therefore the reader's.
The basic idea of this book is appealing. Cricket in New York has a quirky ring to it. Quite why the additional quirk of a Dutchman playing it has been introduced, is hard to say. It smacks of O'Neill simply trying to squeeze all the things he knows about, into one novel. It doesn't work. There is not a love of the game flowing through the words - it is too carefully aimed at Americans who have never heard of the game. Hence, the cricket-as-metaphor idea falls flat on its face. It is perfectly possible to write about cricket and the characters who love it. But not if you're trying to explain the rules to the reader.
After 250 pages, you don't care what the ending is. There is no `big reveal', no satisfying outcome. Hans just stops gently whining. Nothing has hung together; nothing has resonated or given you pause for thought. This is an Emperor's New Clothes novel, which has somehow been marketed into a success, by implying that if you do not love it, you're intellectually unworthy of it.
Great American Novel? It's not even an average novel. I would prefer it if O'Neill had characters I could believe in (even if I hated them), an idea of where those characters are going, and the skill to evoke an era or place with any colour or depth.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A very important novel
Comment: It's hard to add much to the discussion of this book. It is something of a marmite novel, sharply dividing opioion. I go with those who feel it is one of the novels of the decade. I concur witrh the echoes of the Great Gatsby - for my money this novel seems more assured and coherent even than Fitzgerald.
I think this is the most restrained and effective depiction of the Anglo-American post-911 / post Iraq zeitgeist so far. I thnk the writing really offeres something new - while not 100% sucessful, I think the compromised and awkwardly triangulated narrator is about right for the age. The scene where he views the empty garden of his wife's London home on Google Earth sounds trite, but is haunting.
This is the novel McEwan's 'Saturday' aspired to be. Must read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Turgid Big American allegory
Comment: Even if it's not particularly long and the author is Irish, this feels a lot like a self-styled `Big American Novel' - the book is a rambling, outsiders' panorama of post-9/11 America with a symbolical narrative about (sort of) cricket. The main pull is O'Neill's highly lyrical writing style, which at times is quite evocative of John Banville - i.e. dazzlingly (self-consciously?) fancy/scholarly, and much easier to admire from a distance than feel genuine affection for.
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