Fiction has an entrepreneurial element, akin to the inventor’s secret machine, elixir, or formula. Many novelists have had the experience of falling upon the perfect scene or situation or character, the one that will breed meaning and metaphor throughout the book. Gogol surely knew that he had invented a devastating symbolic structure when he came up with the story of a devil figure who travels around Russia buying up the names of dead serfs; he carefully garaged his secret—in a letter, he warned his correspondent not to tell anybody what “Dead Souls” was about. When we read “Herzog,” we think: how brilliant and simple, like the best of inventions, to have turned something we all do (writing letters in our heads to people we have never met) into a new way of representing consciousness. And when we read “Midnight’s Children” we feel that Salman Rushdie has found a powerful controlling image in the impending midnight of Indian partition, the clock’s hands meeting in prayer.

I don’t know whether Joseph O’Neill jumped out of his bath in Manhattan shrieking “Eureka!” when he realized that, of all the possible subjects in the world, he had to write a novel about playing cricket in New York City, but he should have. Despite cricket’s seeming irrelevance to America, the game makes his exquisitely written novel “Netherland” (Pantheon; $23.95) a large fictional achievement, and one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read. Cricket, like every sport, is an activity and the dream of an activity, badged with random ideals, aspirations, and memories. It popularly evokes long English summers, newly mown grass, the causeless boredom of childhood. Its combat is so temperate that, more explicitly than other sports, it encodes an ethics (as in the reproving British expression “It’s not cricket”). But cricket in this novel is much more than these associations: it is an immigrant’s imagined community, a game that unites, in a Brooklyn park, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Indians, West Indians, and so on, even as the game’s un-Americanness accentuates their singularity. Most poignantly, for one of the characters in the novel cricket is an American dream, or perhaps a dream of America; this man is convinced that, as he claims, cricket is not an immigrant sport at all but “the first modern team sport in America . . . a bona fide American pastime,” played in New York since the seventeen-seventies.

The man’s name is Chuck Ramkissoon, and we first hear of him as a corpse. It is 2006, and the novel’s narrator, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek, receives a call in London from a New York Times reporter. The remains of Khamraj Ramkissoon—“It’s Chuck Ramkissoon,” Hans corrects, on the phone—have been found in the Gowanus Canal, and wasn’t Hans a business partner of the victim? No, just a friend, Hans says. Later, to his wife, Rachel, Hans describes Chuck as “a cricket guy I used to know. A guy from Brooklyn.” We don’t realize it yet, but the novel has just unfurled its great theme: this “cricket guy,” an Indian from Trinidad, is an American visionary—Chuck, not Khamraj—and cricket is the macula of that mad vision, and “Netherland” has opened where “The Great Gatsby” ends, with its forlorn dreamer dead in the water.

The unhappy news prompts Hans to recall his years in New York, and the first time he met Chuck, on a cricket field in Randolph Walker Park, on Staten Island, in the summer of 2002. Hans and his wife and son had been living in the Chelsea Hotel, their domicile after the September 11th attacks, “staying on in a kind of paralysis even after we’d received permission from the authorities to return to our loft in Tribeca.” Hans has his own kind of paralysis: large and fair, he is one of nature’s flâneurs, willing to be swept along by powerful events and people, curious but happy to turn a blind eye to human imperfection, fastidious but uncensorious. This reflective sluggishness maddens Rachel, who, already on edge after September 11th, announces that she is leaving him and America. Hans drifts, visiting his wife and son in London twice a month, amiably acquainting himself with some of the eccentrics at the Chelsea Hotel, and eventually taking up cricket, the game of his Dutch childhood.

There are moments when Rachel’s hostility seems a little undeveloped, and one suspects her absence from New York to be merely the necessary fictional trigger for Hans’s hospitable sloth. But, as with “Sentimental Education,” one can forgive a lot of stasis when the verbal rewards, page after page, are so very high. As Hans takes the measure of his newfound city, so the prose finds its own perfect calibrations. O’Neill writes elegant, long sentences, formal but not fussy, pricked with lyrically exact metaphor. Here Hans recalls the days not long after September 11th, when the city was an acoustic sensorium: