He writes about it with casual grace, describing, for example, the cricket batsman’s array of potential strokes: “the glance, the hook, the cut, the sweep, the cover drive, the pull and all those other offspring of technique conceived to send the cricket ball rolling and rolling, as if by magic, to the far-off edge of the playing field.”

Dwight Garner in his front-page review of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland in NYTBR. To savor some of the strokes mentioned above, take a look at this recent clip showcasing the batting of Gautam Gambhir and Virender Sehwag. The clip is from the newly-inaugurated Indian Premier League, duly reported on by Somini Sengupta in the NYT’s pages.

O’Neill’s book sounds fantastic (and it appears the author is himself a cricket player) but may I take a moment to congratulate the New York Times for putting cricket on the front page? Not to take credit away from the book itself which, as Garner tells us, has beautiful passages like this one: “the American adaptation is devoid of the beauty of cricket played on a lawn of appropriate dimensions, where the white-clad ring of infielders, swanning figures on the vast oval, again and again converge in unison toward the batsman and again and again scatter back to their starting points, a repetition of pulmonary rhythm, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors.”

Are you reminded of C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary? James Wood in his own complimentary review of Netherland connects not only O’Neill and James, but also, in the review’s wonderful closing paragraph, Naipaul (Biswas) and Fitzgerald (Gatsby).

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