4 ideas
He recruits Hans, a Dutch banker adrift after his wife leaves post-9/11, as driver and confidant. The novel opens with the news that Chuck's body has been found in the Gowanus Canal, hands bound, the dream unrealized.
A game the host country ignores gives immigrants a shadow civic life, with its own clubs, rules, rivalries and status, inside a nation that does not see it. Playing cricket on Staten Island is a claim to belong in America that American institutions cannot register. That leaves the immigrants both free and marginal.
Hans learned a patient, ground-hugging European batting style, and it fails on rough American outfields where the ball dies in the grass. He only succeeds once he learns to hit the ball in the air. Assimilation works here as a concrete change of technique forced by physical conditions, not as a change of identity. Scoring requires abandoning the form you were taught was correct.
A passive, grieving person can attach himself to another's grand vision and use its energy as a substitute for his own direction. Doing so, he looks away from the violence and fraud that fund it. Hans's detached observer stance lets him enjoy Chuck's 'think fantastic' optimism while staying complicit in his crimes. Only in retrospect does he grasp what he refused to see.