Paying Homage to the Great Gatsby

Many works play on the same themes and characteristics of The Great Gatsby. Many claim that novels like The Hotel New Hampshire, Tom Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel, James Baldwin's Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, and even the ABC show, "Jake Reinvented" come close to being Gatsbyesque. But none pay an homage as ardently as the recently published Netherland, and newest treatise on the American Dream. Check out Michiko Kakutani's New York Times review. Oh, and here is a passage from the blog Mookse and the Gripe:

The final page of Gatsby looks back to the settlement of New York by the Dutch and perhaps can be seen by a Dutch writer (O’Neill was primarily raised in Holland) as an invitation to compose an up-to-date perspective.

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world.

Here the Nick Carraway, the self-reflecting narrator telling a bigger story than his own, is Hans van den Broek, a Dutchman who has moved with his English wife to New York. The Gatsby, the aspiring (or deluded) object of affection, is Chuck Ramkissoon, an imigrant from Trinidad. Daisy Buchanan is invoked as a plan to build a cricket field that will reorient Americans to the world’s civilized sport - and rake in a lot of money.

A sports arena for the greatest cricket teams in the world. Twelve exhibition matches every summer, watched by eight thousand spectators at fifty dollars a pop. I’m talking about advertising, I’m talking about year-round consumption of food and drink in the bar-restaurant. You’re going to have a clubhouse. Two thousand members at one thousand dollars a year plus initiation fee.