Godwin

January 1, 2024

O'Neill's Netherland won the PEN/Faulkner Award, and The Dog was Booker Prize longlisted. He returns, after a nearly 10-year break, with a novel that considers the legacy of colonialism as a pair of brothers, one a UK soccer agent, travel the world in search of an elusive African soccer prodigy who could be the next Messi--and could change the brothers' fortunes. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from February 5, 2024
A Pittsburgh grant writer forays into the world of international soccer in the exciting and incisive latest from O’Neill (Netherland). Mark Wolfe belongs to a co-op of freelance technical writers called the Group. After a client complains about his condescending attitude, the co-op’s cofounder, Lakesha Williams, suspends Mark’s dues payments for two weeks so he can take time to get his head together. His half brother Geoff, a British sports agent, enlists his aid in tracking down a teenage soccer player, known only as Godwin, whose skills impressed Geoff in an online video. Mark leaves his wife and child for England, then France, where he reluctantly partners with an unsavory scout named Jean-Luc Lefebvre, who travels to Benin on their behalf in search of Godwin. With Mark heading back home, O’Neill turns to Lefebvre’s adventures in Benin, which involve potholes, mosquitoes, and an endangered species of dog. It would be a spoiler to reveal what Mark learns over the course of his and Lefebvre’s attempt to recruit Godwin, or how the backroom dealings at the Group impact him and Lakesha. As O’Neill artfully pairs the thrill of the hunt for Godwin with the complex politics of cooperative work, the driving force that connects the twinned narratives is the corruptive power of capitalism. This has all the velocity and swerve of an unstoppable free kick.

March 15, 2024
A sports agent's pursuit of a soccer prodigy stirs up old family resentments. O'Neill's breakthrough novel, Netherland (2008), was partly a paean to cricket and tracked one character's quest to build an arena in Brooklyn. Here the sport is soccer and the holy grail is an elusive young player who's somewhere in Africa. None of that is evident as the book opens with a chapter narrated by Lakesha Williams, co-founder of a technical-writing cooperative in Pittsburgh, who faces an HR challenge with a fractious colleague named Mark Wolfe. It's only in the next chapter, narrated by Mark (he and Lakesha alternate), that we learn of his younger half brother, Geoffrey Anibal, who's begging Mark for help in locating the prodigy--named Godwin, as if to suggest what a prize he could be. Geoff is a fledgling sports agent and a bit of a con man looking to kick-start a career and a fortune. Mark feels their mother not only neglected him but also cheated him out of an inheritance. O'Neill has a gift for finding humor in emotional stress, and it shines in the two men's confrontations and in the co-op's increasingly tense office politics. The semi-siblings bring in a third potential ally for their Godwin campaign, a veteran French soccer agent named Jean-Luc Lefebvre. The three go through twists and turns, culminating in an African odyssey--rendered by Lefebvre in an astonishing marathon of storytelling--that highlights the avarice of sports recruitment and the legacy of colonialism. Along with these banner themes are the overarching questions: How should we treat each other and how do we deal with mistreatment, on any scale? While the Lakesha and Mark narratives both serve these themes, some readers may struggle with how disparate the story lines remain until a late and surprising convergence. But then good stories often rely on delayed gratification. Another exceptional entry in the O'Neill corpus.

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April 15, 2024
O'Neill used cricket in his multi-award-winning Netherland (2008) to explore post-9/11 America, postcolonial politics, and so much more. In his latest, the murky world of international soccer agents and a technical writing collective in Pittsburgh are the lenses through which O'Neill critiques contemporary capitalism. Mark Wolfe, a talented technical writer, is contacted by his half-brother Geoff, who is trying to become a soccer agent. Wolfe travels to England to help and is swallowed up by a world of shady deals, promised riches, and neocolonialism as they attempt to trace Godwin, a preternaturally gifted soccer player based somewhere in Africa. The star of these sections is the grizzled French agent, Lefebvre, whose propulsively compelling accounts of his experiences are laced with humor and troubling racial ideas. The perspective shifts between Wolfe and his vortex of a family and Lakesha Williams, whose emotionless steadiness is required to maintain the technical writing collective that Wolfe is a part of. Soccer and its barely regulated workings reveal much about the continuing echoes of the horrors of colonialism, as well as the promises and ugliness of late capitalism. This is a wondrous novel, full of insights, one that leaves the reader questioning why there isn't more fiction about the world's most popular sport.

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