A growing number of novels have explored New Yorkers' experiences in the days that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. Joseph O'Neill's accomplished new novel, "Netherland," is a little different. It's not merely about politics or psychology or survival.

It explores a more complicated question of home and a sense of belonging.

The terrorist attacks force Hans van den Broek and his family from their New York loft. But even after receiving permission to return home, they remain in the Chelsea Hotel.

Hans describes their inability to move back home as "a kind of paralysis." They have fallen prey, it seems, to the inertia of existential stillness.

Eventually, Hans' British-born wife announces that she is returning to London with their young son. Ostensibly, the threat of another terrorist attack motivates her, but the prospect of a marital reunion doesn't look good.

Hans, a Dutch-born equities analyst, remains at the Chelsea, interacting only rarely with the hotel's eccentric residents.

It's not his first experience in limbo.

Somehow, the isolated stages of his life -- from the Netherlands to England and finally New York -- don't add up to a coherent, evolving self.

Hans calls the condition "self-estrangement" and says, "I find it hard to muster oneness with those former selves whose accidents and endeavors have shaped who I am now."

Cricket, that quintessentially British game incomprehensible to modern Americans, rescues Hans. He had played the sport as a child in the Netherlands, and now, playing it in New York with West Indians, it somehow brings him closer to his childhood, and a sense of home.

Soon, he finds himself drawn to a Trinidadian friend's dream of building a state-of-the-art cricket field in New York. The charismatic Chuck Ramkissoon understands that selling the game toAmericans won't be easy. But the plan might work, he suggests, if he promotes it as a game that Americans avidly played in the 18th and 19th centuries.

We sometimes need to be reminded who we have been in order to feel at home, he pointedly suggests.

"Netherland" isn't driven by plot points such as whether Hans and his wife will reconcile. From the opening pages, we know they will. We also learn soon after the novel begins that Ramkissoon will be murdered, although we don't know why.

The book's suspense lies chiefly in how Hans will draw his former selves into a coherent story. Not for us readers, but for himself.

Watching him assemble it is mesmerizing.
Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at www.thewag.net.