Godwin: A Novel
By Joseph O’Neill
Pantheon
277 pages
Joseph O’Neill’s new novel, Godwin, charts the quest to recruit a young, legendary—if not mythical—soccer superstar-to-be. He’s known as Godwin, and rumors suggest he’s located somewhere on the African continent.
Godwin is also the story of Lakesha Williams, who runs a technical-writing cooperative in Pittsburgh, where Mark Wolfe, a disgruntled technical writer, works on a freelance basis.
Mark, enlisted by his half-brother Geoff (an aspiring, England-based sports agent), becomes embroiled in Geoff’s latest scheme to hit the big time—that is, find Godwin and sign him as an exclusive client. Mark is skeptical, but at Geoff’s urging, he travels to London, hoping for new purpose in his life.
With Geoff’s long history of failed enterprises, it seems Mark shouldn’t be surprised when bills go unpaid, and promises aren’t kept. The fact that he is surprised, after all these years, points to an uncomfortable and implausible naïveté on his part.
From London, Mark flies to Paris, seeking the support of Jean-Luc Lefebvre, a semi-retired soccer scout. When the Frenchman goes in search of Godwin in far-off Benin, a sizeable part of Godwin leaves Mark and Geoff behind. It’s one of several peculiar narrative strategies O’Neill employs to tell his story.
The novel’s opening pages—first narrated by Lakesha (soon caught up in the throes of office politics), then Mark, back to Lakesha, and so on—are marked by brisk prose and closely observed insights. But during Mark’s journey to England, a long stretch of exposition about soccer and related matters threatens to stall the narrative’s forward motion.
Other digressions ensue. At one point, Mark ruminates on the intrusion of phones in normal life:
“The general history of the telephone call, it can be safely said, is a grim one. Who can begin to measure or even grasp the volume of the calamities reported or produced by this sound-transmission system?”
Later, encountering the hostess of an Airbnb, Mark reflects on the vulnerability of small businesses to negative online reviews:
“For that’s all it would take: one vicious person with a keyboard. And who isn’t vicious? It’s the capacity of viciousness that separates humans from the animals. Historically, the reach of our malice was limited by physical space. You could hurl a spear, or shout an insult, only so far. Now a rotten tomato can be thrown from any distance to indelible effect.”
While the writing in Godwin is often vivid, passing observations like these fall flat, and do little to propel the story along.
Mark is a troubled, self-loathing person. Geoff, with his self-absorbed quirks and aura of unreliability, is even more problematic. With characters like these (Lakesha, by contrast, seems earnest and mature), a reader might question the prospect of what lies ahead.
Not until late in the novel does the strategy of dual narrators become clear. Some readers—dissuaded by Mark’s asides, or his thinly-portrayed wife’s infallible instincts about life, or Geoff’s maddening habit of addressing others as “fam,” “bruv,” and “blud”—may have already moved on.
Author Bio:
Lee Polevoi, Highbrow Magazine’s chief book critic, is the author of two novels, The Confessions of Gabriel Ash, and The Moon in Deep Winter.
For Highbrow Magazine
Photo Credits: Depositphotos.com; Penguin Random House