Had America remained a British colony for as long as India, they would be playing Test cricket these days. After all, the fixture between the US and Canada predates those between England and Australia. Christopher Martin-Jenkins in the Times reflects on whether the Americans can learn to love cricket.

“The New York Cricket Club was a splendid idea,” one of the peripheral characters says in Joseph O'Neill's engaging, poignant, subtle novel Netherland, recently nominated for this year's Man Booker prize. “But would the project have worked? No. There's a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket."

Andrew Anthony interviews the author in the Observer.

'I was stuck in Canada and my plane ticket didn't take me back for another couple of days, so I read for a day and I read a book that really helped me called Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. She is the sort of person who spends 20 years writing a novel. It was so slow. Nothing really happened and it was so attentive just to sentences. And I suddenly thought, why don't I write exactly what I want to write and to hell with the plot points.'

He junked the second half of the book and started again from scratch. The result is a gorgeous, ruminative prose in which every sentence feels written, not typed. Comparisons have been made to F Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby, and the poignant echo of that book can be clearly heard in a number of passages. The elegy is not commonplace in the modern English novel. There are examples, like Alan Hollinghurst's exquisite The Line of Beauty, which is also reminiscent of Gatsby, but on the whole it's an American form, inextricably tied to what Mehta, in relation to Netherland, called 'the compromised beauty of the American dream'.