Joseph O'Neill surfaces - glad to see his fiction in current New Yorker

Glad to see short fiction by Joseph O'Neill in current New Yorker - first time they've published him I think - following his breakout Netherland, which is one of the few novels of recent years that I admired for both literary excellence and narrative entertainment - and have wondered if it was a one-off or if it was the start of a great career - and since then a pretty long silence (I did not go back and read his first two books, figuring they would tarnish rather than burnish the image); O'Neill seems one of those European English-educated polymaths, if I remember he is from Ireland, lived in the Netherlands, law school maybe @ Cambridge?, came to the U.S. where he could presumably make a lot of $ in international law, set it aside to pursue writing (wonder if his wife is the bread-earner, as one might think from reading Netherland), lived in the super-hip Chelsea Hotel - all the best writer creds, and with all those reasons to dislike him I still really liked his novel, so there. Bio note in NYer says a new one due this fall; the short piece in the NYer, called Referees, doesn't seem like a story - it ends far too abruptly and inartfully to make me think O'Neill composed it as a separate piece - so I'm guessing it may have been lifted from the forthcoming novel (writers ought to pay the NYer for doing that, rather than the other way around). Expectations for a short story format aside, the piece is really quite terrific; O'Neill very expertly captures the 30-something dude vernacular - showing even further range than he exhibited in Netherland, which was all in Brahmin literary serious tone of a highly literate narrator - as if an Updiken novel were narrated by ... an Updike. This story is simply about a guy he needs to personal references to move into a co-op apartment and, in his attempt over a few days to get them, manages to tell us the sorrowful tale of his life: left NY some years back for Portland, Oregon, now has divorced and returned and his former friends have moved on although he knows many people and even has a reasonably well-paying job he seems to have no family or friends who will put in a word for him - or those who could or might or would have so little obligation to him that they can barely give him the time; at the extremes are a distant cousin who says sure but I'm really busy why don't you write it yourself and I'll sign, and a long-estranged friend who obviously resents how the narrator broke off their friendship many years ago - and narrator too obtuse to recognize that or to desperate to care. The letter this guy sends is quite amusing, in its way (so is the letter from the guy's supervisor at work - who has no clue how damning such a half-hearted reference can be); the artwork illustrating the story is quite imaginative as well - take a look back at it after you finish the story.