O’Neill is back on the field again with a new novel called “Godwin.” But the sport this time is soccer — “football,” for fans across the pond. As before, while your eye follows the ball, the real action plays out among the forces shaping the global economy, the flow of immigrants and the nature of work.
Nobody else’s fiction tears up the ground quite like O’Neill’s profoundly introspective novels. But I worry that they’re essentially review-proof. They can sound, in summary, either too static to be interesting, like “The Dog,” or too convoluted to be intelligible, like this new one. And yet in their careful braiding of anxiety and aspiration, his stories are marvels of narrative magic and stylistic panache.
“Godwin” plays out along two separate tracks that remain mysteriously askew until the very end. The book begins as an arch office satire set in Pittsburgh. An African American woman named Lakesha is an irresistibly odd narrator — so intentional about establishing a community and yet so utterly alone. She’s the co-leader of a co-op for technical writers. “A collective like the Group is attractive to someone who wants to stay self-employed but doesn’t want the risk, hassle, and isolation associated with being a sole trader or freelancer,” Lakesha explains. Naturally, the story that develops is one of risk, hassle and isolation.
O’Neill has such a well-tuned ear for the comedy of office politics, particularly as gassed up by left-wing ideals. “We were not ideological,” Lakesha claims, but she admits that the members of the Group “had our own ideas about what constitutes value.” The business that Lakesha has co-founded sports “a strongly horizontal ethos.” In the weirdly modulated voice of an HR cultist, she declares, “We embraced the concept of decision latitude.” Each member, for instance, is required to serve a shift on the nightly janitorial crew because “there is nothing like an egalitarian donation of time and labor to enhance team spirit.”
Even the physical space has been designed to promote the advent of a workers’ paradise. The open-plan office offers “think pods” and long benches and other abominations of modern business architecture. “If alienation could not be extinguished, surely it could be reduced,” Lakesha says. “Surely a positive solidarity was possible.”
If you’ve worked in an office with actual human beings, you surely know this nirvana will not be attained. The problem is that nobody shares Lakesha’s pure vision of what the Group should be or how its members should behave. Also, as is so often the case in utopian communities, Lakesha’s understanding of egalitarianism is predicated on her own superiority.
The conflict that eventually divides the office involves a talented, if brooding member of the Group named Mark Wolfe. But Wolfe’s story — told by him in alternating chapters — moves far outside the office and even outside the United States. Indeed, for more than 200 pages, O’Neill’s agile narrative performs a double scissor stepover that keeps us wondering how the story will break.
The adventure begins when Wolfe, “more than a little sick of the taste of life,” gets a call from his half brother, Geoff, in England. Once a semiprofessional soccer player, Geoff now imagines himself to be a sports agent who ferrets out talented young players years before anyone else has spotted them. Through some highly suspicious route, he’s purchased a once-in-a-lifetime lead: a sketchy video clip of a boy who will be the next Lionel Messi.
The only thing standing in the way of signing this lucrative future star — “one of the most valuable soccer talents in Africa. Maybe in the world” — is that Geoff doesn’t have any idea where the boy lives. He thinks his name might be Godwin.
Could Wolfe help find him?
Wolfe immediately realizes this plan is ridiculous: He’s never been to Africa. He knows nothing at all about soccer or working as an agent. But something about his half brother’s scheme excites Wolfe’s imagination. His latent rapaciousness draws him into a treasure hunt worth “hundreds of millions.”
“My unspoken fantasy,” Wolfe confesses, “was that I was a furtive ideological hero and that one day I’d come out of hiding and my scorn for riches and recognition would pay off — in recognition and riches, of course.” Soon, Wolfe imagines that he’s actually doing something noble. “This kid, Godwin, needs the help of an honest person like me,” he claims. “There are sharks out there.” You don’t say.
As always, O’Neill is experimenting with how stories are spun within stories. There’s an absurdist quality to this quest — what Samuel Beckett might have called “Waiting for Godwin” — a disorienting blend of pointlessness and obsession. It’s an unsettling feature of O’Neill’s fiction: He can appear to be stalling for long sections right up until the moment you realize he’s actually sprinted far ahead of you.
“An adventure boils down to a sequence of uncontrollable, unpleasant, and unwanted events,” Wolfe says, but his adventure is also hypnotic and grimly witty. One dramatically extended chapter reads like a parody of “Heart of Darkness,” a trek ever deeper into the most dangerous territory of Africa to find this elusive boy and offer him all the riches that professional athletics can provide.
But as O’Neill suggests, the salvation that Wolfe hopes to give Godwin is a modern manifestation of Western exploitation, another effort to mine the riches of Africa for the benefit of “enlightened” Europeans. Godwin, if he even exists, is a valuable commodity to track down and extract.
Not that O’Neill would ever tell a story so straightforward and polemical. Like Godwin, this novelist is a player whose charges and feints will leave you amazed — and defeated.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”
Godwin
By Joseph O’Neill
Pantheon. 277 pp. $28
