Book Review: ‘Godwin,’ by Joseph O’Neill

GODWIN, by Joseph O’Neill

It’s possible that you have encountered someone like Mark Wolfe, a restive 40-something in Pittsburgh who has, in his own words, “not fully recovered from a decade spent as an active member of the American intelligentsia.” Maybe you’ve worked with this guy, slept with him, sparred with him on social media.

It’s also possible that reading Mark’s alternately diffident and combative first-person narration in “Godwin,” Joseph O’Neill’s sharp and slippery new novel, will provoke a more intimate tremor of recognition, especially when he describes the intellectual milieu that formed him:

Everyone was disdained, oneself especially. The performance of kicking in one’s own rotten ideological floorboards was something we called “reflexivity.” This was a cop-out, of course, but it was a smart cop-out. Being smart — which we confused with being knowledgeable — was less about seeing something for what it was than about critically viewing one’s act of seeing, and then critically viewing oneself critically viewing one’s originally seeing self, and so on infinitely, as in an Escher, without vertigo.

Ouch.

But let’s keep things fictional. Mark reminded me of one of Ben Lerner’s prickly alter egos. And of the angry, nameless protagonist of Jonathan Dee’s “Sugar Street.” Also of Tony Gallo, the radical aspiring journalist in Eleanor Catton’s “Birnam Wood.” For all his professed leftist principles, for all his shamefaced awareness of the privilege his white, cisgender heterosexual maleness confers, Mark — like those other dudes — can’t quite shake his entitlement to being the center of attention, the smartest person in the room, the main character.

But is he? Mark shares narratorial duties with Lakesha Williams, his colleague at a cooperative for freelance technical writers. Lakesha is a founder of the Group (as it’s called) and one of its leaders. She speaks first in “Godwin,” and also gets the last word. Mark, a marginal, intermittently productive, somewhat problematic Group member, takes up more space in the book, partly because his blustery temperament drowns out Lakesha’s rigorous circumspection. His theory talk trumps her buttoned-up H.R. jargon.

“What I saw, when I looked at Wolfe,” Lakesha says, using his possibly metaphorical surname, “was a member with output issues.” She also surmises that he is “suffering from a crisis of dignity,” which may be a more succinct summary of his condition than his many pages of globe-trotting and navel-gazing.