their child in England. The American Dream has fallen apart for this family.

The Great Gatsby is set earlier, in the 1920s, but the characters are also seeking the American Dream even though they were all raised in America. Jay Gatsby wants to become rich. He wants to make a name for himself and find a life of wealth and fame he has never known growing up in the Midwest. He does this, and his mansion becomes a symbol of his success. Yet Gatsby is not really happy. He is missing something in his life. He has loved Daisy for years, but his newly found wealth is not enough for her. She wants old money, so she refuses to leave Tom to be with Gatsby. The American Dream has not made Gatsby happy. He always wants something more. By the end of the novel, he is dead, murdered trying to shield Daisy's guilt. For Gatsby, disillusionment has turned to tragedy.

In Joseph O’Neill’s recent novel and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, the American dream comes off as ultimately artificial, unrealizable, or, as the question puts it, “a trap.”

The trap of the American dream is symbolized in the two central characters of each work: Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby and Chuck Ramkissoon in Netherland. Ramkissoon’s maxim, “think fantastic,” can be evinced in Gatsby’s fabulous parties and glamorous lifestyle. The saying also reflects how both men uphold the idea that America is an amazing country where great, extravagant things can happen.

Of course, on the outside, America might seem like a glittering, shiny country. Gatsby and Ramkissoon, as representatives of this kind of gilded America, are not without their surface charms. Their charismatic, fast-paced lifestyles enchant many people, including the more milquetoast narrators, Hans van den Broek and Nick Carraway.

Yet when one looks a little closer, what they find is a lifestyle built upon underhanded, criminal activities. Gatsby’s American dream derives from organized crime. Meanwhile, Ramkissoon’s American dream centers on a questionable gambling enterprise. In both cases, the American dream is less of a dream and more of a grift, a delusion, or a trap.

The trap component of the American dream becomes clear because all of the constant activity doesn’t bring Gatsby or Ramkissoon fulfillment. Gatsby never gets Daisy, and Ramkissoon never realizes his formidable cricket team. Both characters end up dead. Perhaps the authors kill their respective American dream representatives as a way to say that the American dream is dead or should have never been given life in the first place.

Then again, its death doesn’t appear to make it less appealing. Even with the American dream’s link to suspect antiheroes like Gatsby and Ramkissoon, it’s popularity has not seemed to wane. TV series like Succession and The Undoing continue to link the American dream to corrupt, cruel, and lethal individuals. Yet the success of Gatsby, Netherlands, and the aforementioned TV shows demonstrate that there remains something compelling about the transparent treachery of the American dream.

Both Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby show an American dream that has been corrupted through greed and immorality. Let's look at how this works in each book.

In Netherland, Dutch businessman Hans van den Broek is pursuing a career in New York City when the September 11 attacks shatter his life. His wife, Rachel, has an extremely difficult time coping with the aftermath of the tragedy, and Hans and Rachel's marriage is already struggling. Rachel leaves, moving to London, and Hans begins a friendship with another immigrant, Chuck Ramkissoon, originally from Trinidad.

By this point, Hans's American dream is already suffering. Chuck's, however, has become almost completely corrupted through shady and often violent business dealings. Hans continues to spend time with Chuck due to their shared interest in cricket, but eventually he has to admit to himself that Chuck is not worthy of his attention. Hans gives up on his American dream and goes to London to reconcile with Rachel. Chuck loses his American dream when he is murdered.

In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway is chasing the American dream when he moves from Minnesota to New York in the early 1920s. He does not find it. What he finds is the social circle of Jay Gatsby and Tom and Daisy Buchanan. For these three, the American dream is all about getting rich and developing the “right” connections.

These characters do get rich, of course, but they are far from happy. Gatsby is in love with Daisy, and they have an affair, but Daisy returns to her husband in the end because Tom can give her the social standing she desires. Gatsby ends up dead at the hands of George Wilson, the husband of Tom's mistress, Myrtle. George blames Gatsby for Myrtle's hit-and-run death, and Gatsby takes the blame to shield Daisy, who was actually driving. The American dream is shattered for everyone, and Nick learns an important lesson that the American dream is not found in money and social status.

This is an excellent question because there are unmistakable parallels between The Great Gatsby and Netherland (as reviewers have noted). For the purpose of your question, however, perhaps the more significant fact is that Joseph O'Neill's novel is narrated by a man transplanted from Europe to New York City. It is thus principally the view of America given us by a non-American.

Hans van den Broek comes to New York from Holland, by way of London first. If we wish to see it this way, he's the Nick Carroway character, and the man he meets in the US who becomes a focus of the story is Chuck, originally from Trinidad. In bonding over the game of cricket, we already have a startlingly appropriate metaphor of the concept of America as seen by the author. All of us are something else before we are "American," and so, in this context, is this non-American sport something else (though the quintessential American game, baseball, is similar), here played by expatriates on a field in Staten Island (itself a kind of non-New-York part of New York). Chuck is the Gatsby figure. Like Gatsby, there is something not on the up-and-up about him, except that here we are given the revelation at the very start of the tale in the news that Chuck has been found murdered. As with Gatsby, the success, the Dream that Chuck has supposedly found in America—and which the narrator Hans (like Nick) latches on to in his own way and with his own goals—is a facade, a "trap," as your question terms it, because in both cases these men sought success but were transgressors in some way and instead found death.

Yet despite this obvious parallel, what Netherland communicates is a far more self-conscious critique of "America" than Gatsby does, probably for the straightforward reason that its view of the US, as stated, is from the outside, from a man (Hans) who typically notes the incorrect pronunciation of the word "milieu" by the American newswoman who contacts him by phone in England to ask him about Chuck. Even so, Fitzgerald's perspective in Gatsby is that of an outsider as well—a Midwesterner and a Roman Catholic in WASP-dominated New York elite society. The "trap" of the Dream seems, unfortunately, one that disproportionately catches those who are on the outside looking in.