Outlegged by news networks that never sleep, outsold by the juggernaut of visual entertainment, the novel doesn't bring us the news as it once did. At least it's easy to think so until you read a book like Joseph O'Neill's splendid "Netherland." This wholly unexpected novel turns the city once known as Nieuw Amsterdam inside out with the tale of an ex-pat Dutch banker trying to cling to his crumbling marriage and family in the aftermath of Sept. 11. It is a fabulous, profoundly enjoyable New York story about the fantasies that prop up our daily reality -- in other words, a deeply New York novel about that deeply New York penchant for new beginnings.

The man we're rooting for -- and it's impossible not to cheer him on -- is Hans van den Broek, a 6-foot-5, forty- something stock analyst. He spends a good deal of this novel holed up at the Chelsea Hotel, the bohemian landmark where Arthur Miller wrote some of his best-known work and Andy Warhol once called home. Something essential has jostled free from Hans' marriage, sending his wife back to her native England with their son, Jake. Hans stays behind, and pours his restless, misbegotten self into a cricket league out on Staten Island, where he meets and befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian entrepreneur of sorts. It is Chuck's dream to build a world-class cricket arena -- he doesn't like the word "stadium" -- in Brooklyn.

This unlikely plot provides more than enough power for the book, because it allows O'Neill to do what he does best: riff, observe and ruminate, through Hans' eyes, on life in New York. No writer since Paul Auster has captured the mystery of the city so well -- the scuzzy diners and bumbling eccentrics, the mythology of self-renewal, the pockets of populations so hastily mashed together. Hans, as O'Neill has created him, is a perfect guide.

He can even make Times Square seem vaguely appealing. "Whereas others felt mocked and diminished by the square's storming of the senses and detected malevolence or Promethean impudence in the molten progress of the news tickers and in the fifty-foot visages that looked down from vinyl billboards and in the twinkling shouted advertisements for drinks and Broadway musicals, I always regarded these shimmers and vapors as one might the beck feathers of certain of the city's pigeons -- as natural, humble sources of iridescence."

Hans is lonely but curious, old enough to be skeptical, desperate enough to allow himself the aperture of optimism, even after witnessing (or at least rubbernecking at) the spectacle that was Sept. 11. As a Dutchman, he is always on the outside, which in New York puts him right at the center.

O'Neill seems intuitively to understand this placement in putting together this remarkable book. Cricket, as it turns out, is a perfect metaphor for how to become an American -- that's what Chuck and Hans and all the Guyanese, Pakistani, Indian and West Indian men are doing out on Staten Island in the most nonchalant way, planting their own traditions on American soil and making of it a ratty hybrid. But they're also just playing a game -- forgetting themselves. It's a fine balance, one that New Yorkers had to relearn after 9/11, an event this book molds itself around, then ultimately transcends. O'Neill has stuffed "Netherland" full of echoes of that day, but also with sentences so beautiful that they lodge in the reader's mind. They remind us of the inimitable pleasure of encountering the world through its shapely reflection in a book -- even if what that book shows us is far too rundown to be glamorous anymore.

John Freeman is writing a book on the tyranny of e-mail.