“The New York Cricket Club was a splendid idea,” one of the peripheral characters says in Joseph O'Neill's engaging, poignant, subtle novel Netherland, recently nominated for this year's Man Booker prize. “But would the project have worked? No. There's a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket.”

Of the central figure in the book whose “splendid idea” it was he adds: “He wanted to take the game to the Americans. He wanted to expand the operation, get them watching it, playing it. Start a whole cricketing revolution. My idea was different. My idea was, you don't need America. Why would you? You have the TV, internet markets in India, in England. These days that's plenty. America? Not relevant. You put the stadium there and you're done. Finito la musica.”

Well, there is a cricket stadium in Florida now, purpose built, too. New interest in the game sparked by the rapid sales of Netherland and the recent reinstatement of the United States as an ICC member after a period of suspension mean that, not for the first time, there is an opportunity for cricket in the United States. The dream for some, in fact as well as in fiction, is that it could expand in a dramatic way. Americans, after all, have been toying with the game since the days of W.G. Grace when Philadelphia was a centre of the game and J.Barton King one of the world's great fast bowlers.

Had America remained a British colony for as long as India, they would be playing Test cricket these days. After all, the fixture between the US and Canada predates those between England and Australia. The emergence into public consciousness of Allen Stanford, the Texan, is one indication that a fair wind may again be blowing for cricket in the US, even if his theatre is Antigua. But O'Neill knows much better than Stanford the real nature of cricket on the other side of the Atlantic and particularly in New York, where he lives, a barrister turned full-time author, married to the fashion editor for Vogue magazine.

Son of an Irish building constructor and English mother, he was brought up in the Netherlands, where he learnt cricket at The Hague (the narrator of his novel is Dutch). He was educated in England and sounds English, although he can switch to Irish in a twinkling if you mention it. He is so besotted by cricket that he plays it with a passion in conditions far removed from the pristine tidiness of the Cambridge college grounds on which he represented the Crusaders, the University second team, in the early 1980s.

Yet there is a link between cricket in Cambridge and New York, to judge from his description of seven or eight games being played on the same afternoon in the same park, much as used to be the case at Parker's Piece when Jack Hobbs was a boy growing up near Fenner's. In O'Neill's New York, matches have to wait for softball games to finish and someone has painted a “rivalrous” baseball diamond in a corner of Walker Park.

But the joyous family participation of the opposing team from St Kitts in a match against his Dutch narrator's team composed otherwise of men from Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka has the resounding sound of authenticity.

The Dutchman, schooled on a left-elbow technique, eventually learns that batting in New York requires courage, a good eye and the muscle power to lift the ball over a thickly grassed outfield. The Twenty20 approach, in fact, which is not inappropriate. “There are some Antiguans who have played Twenty20 in the Stanford tournament in our league and we've got lots of ex or semi-pro players,” O'Neill told me. “We are desperate for some of the Stanford action here. There's definitely scope for a small cricket stadium in New York. Mind you, I'm a bit sceptical about the way that the ECB have got into bed with Stanford and his money with such desperate eagerness.”

O'Neill arrived in New York in 1998. “The first thing I did was to find somewhere to play,” he said. “I was put in touch with a Pakistani who was trying to build a cricket stadium. I ended up at Staten Island CC, which, of course, is a historic club. We won our first league match last week, which was a relief.” His enthusiasm brings to mind the lines of Jeff Cloves, the poet, on park cricketers everywhere: “We are cricketers here, and we care, we care.”

The United States of America Cricket Association (USACA) was reinstated by the ICC in April under the presidency of the evocatively named Gladstone Dainty, having been suspended in 2007 because grants from the world's governing body kept disappearing without trace and no unified American body could survive internal rivalries in so vast a country.

Matthew Kennedy, the ICC's development manager, who has seen the number of cricketers in the non-Test countries more than double in the past five years, is guardedly optimistic. “We are looking at this as a fresh start and I'm hoping that all those administrators concerned can and will successfully unite and lead US cricket development into a period of positive progression,” he said. “The ICC sees the appointment of a chief executive of the USACA as a vital priority. The development programme will work hard to encourage proper budgeting and planning. With nearly three times more senior cricket teams than all other non-Test nations, there is real potential for success. On the field the ICC World Cricket League gives the opportunity for the US team to move out of division five and break into the top ten associate members within the next two years or so. If they can do this, it will bring even greater ICC attention and funding.”

But O'Neill does not underestimate the difficulties. “There are sufficient young players and although it will never overtake baseball, there is sufficient of a cricket culture for the US to become at least the equivalent of, say, Kenya,” he said. “But the game is divided regionally. We need some disinterested administrators who are not in it for themselves.”

The USACA may be contacted through the president at gadainty@aol.com, or the secretary, John Aaron, at johnlaaron2000@aol.com