806 The American Century: Literature since 1945Chuck has a dream that circles around cricket. He wants to build a cricket
stadium, to create a “Bald Eagle Field” in an abandoned field in Brooklyn. Cricket,
for Chuck, is or could be the true American game: “NOT AN IMMIGRANT SPORT”
is the subject line of one of the many unsolicited email messages that, in his
enthusiasm for his project, he sends to business associates and friends. It is “not an
immigrant sport” since what we have here is the relocation of the American dream,
the dream of Gatsby and so many other American heroes, in a deterritorialized
America. The details of Chuck’s plan may be suspect, but there is no doubting his
commitment, or his belief that the new Americans from South Asia, the West Indies,
and elsewhere could provide the basis for turning cricket into the national sport of
the United States. It may be a utopian dream, but it is founded on the indelible fact
of a transformed America: a hybrid territory, like the one Hans encounters on his
car trips with Chuck into the outer boroughs of New York. A word of caution is
necessary here. The utopian dream of Chuck is just that, the dream of a deeply
compromised character. In the end, like Gatsby’s, his rage for order – in this case,
what he sees as the civility of cricket – ends in violence. Chuck, it turns out, is
capable of violence in pursuit of his business aims; and eventually his dead body is
found in a canal, hands tied behind his back. What Netherland maps, in its
representation of cricket, is not the geography of civility – Chuck’s belief that “all
people ... are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket” – but the geography
of heterogeneity and power, or, to be more exact, of the intricate series of power
relations that what Hans calls “an intercontinental cast of characters” engage in on
the field and in the world. It is this, not a field of dreams but a field of encounter,
that the metonym of cricket offers in Netherland. What cricket, and for that matter
the novel as a whole, disclose is the series of fault lines, the interstices between
individuals and cultures as they go about the business of living and coming to terms
with each other in an environment where all the borders, all forms of demarcation
are porous and negotiable.
Unlike Netherland, The Garden of Last Days begins and ends in the world of the
underclass; there is no diversion from the marginalized into metropolitan glitz here.
This is the terrain of dirty realism: Mobil Stations, industrial parks, and lap dancing
clubs, where people are down on their luck most of the time and do not know why.
The thematic and tonal character of The Garden of Last Days is established in its
opening pages, where we are introduced to a young stripper named April Marie
Connors – known under the stage name of Spring in the Puma Club where she
works. She is driving to work with a scalding cup of coffee between her thighs.
Behind her in the car is her pre-school daughter Franny. April is a single mother; the
woman called Jean who normally looks after Franny while April works is having
tests for heart trouble and so cannot babysit; without a fallback sitter, April has been
forced, for the first time, to take Franny to the club, to be looked after by the “house
mom,” Tina. And, as she drives through the rundown terrain of urban Florida, a
sprawling development strip that is as seedy as it is ephemeral, April tries to convince
herself that everything will be “fine.” Then, forced to make an “illegal U-turn
through the median strip” to get to the club, April turns too quickly, “splashing theGGray_c05.indd 806ray_c 05 .indd 806 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM