In Joseph O’Neill’s ‘Godwin,’ a mysterious soccer phenom inspires a global search — and reveals the ugliness behind the beautiful game - The Boston Globe (2024)

Nearly three decades have passed since “Jerry Maguire” schooled us all on the gladitorial arena of sports agenting, netting Tom Cruise an Oscar nomination for playing agent to the football star played by Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding Jr. Lousy deals, double-crosses, easy cash (remember “Show me the money”?): all melded into comedic gold. Now Joseph O’Neill’s exuberant sports caper novel, “Godwin,” evokes the film’s irresistible rhythms and tropes.

Pittsburgh, 2015. A 37-year-old medical writer, Mark Wolfe, huddles with other freelancers in The Group, a kind of non-hierarchical working group that somehow has a boss, Lakesha Williams. Mark’s a few years older than his millennial colleagues, handsome, a white guy happily married to Shushila, a Sri Lankan-American, and father of Fizzy, a winsome toddler. Lakesha considers him smart if quirky and aloof. After Mark scuffles with a security guard at work she asks him to take a sabbatical, cool his jets. Shushila suggests that he visit his younger half-brother in London. Mark and Geoff share a mother, Faye, but Mark was raised in the US by his late father, while Geoff grew up English. Now he works as a London-based sports agent, speaking a kind of British urban slang — “bruv,” “fam,” “blud” — that Mark finds performative. (O’Neill delights in spoofing slang and corporate jargon.)

The agent has uncovered an online video of Godwin, a Messi-style soccer prodigy, current whereabouts unknown. Visual clues in the video point to a West African country, possibly Benin, but Geoff is distracted by players in Mauritania, offloading the hunt for Godwin onto Mark, who initially can’t resist his brother. “It is not explained where we are going, or what is going on, but it doesn’t matter,” he notes. “We are headed somewhere, and transcendence is in the air. I quicken with a wild feeling of anticipation that I’ve not had since the bad old masculine days.” Aided by Jean-Luc Lefebvre, an elderly white French scout with an eagle eye for talent and a suspect agenda, Mark eventually sidesteps Geoff. Hijinks ensue; and Mark returns home, less money in his pockets and no star in his sights. But Africa beckons to Mark once Lefebvre appears, unannounced, in Pittsburgh.

“Godwin” unfolds in the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, signaling the novel’s political concerns, a medieval Grail quest reimagined for the 21st century, grounded in race, capitalism, and the scorched-earth legacy of colonialism. “Dutch clubs very frankly sought out dark boys, to use their own terminology,” Lefebvre tells Mark. “It was thought that white boys were over-coached whereas dark boys still played the game of the streets, and therefore retained the inventiveness and scrappiness and unpredictability of the street footballer.”

Half-Irish, half-Turkish, O’Neill’s attuned to the tenuous future of nation-states and the harsh inequities midwifed by global neoliberalism. A New Yorker since 1998, he grew up in Holland but also globally, with stints in Mozambique, Turkey, South Africa, and Iran, before studying law at Cambridge. He’s best known for his PEN/Faulkner winner, “Netherland,” which chronicled a Staten Island cricket club in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. There’s no writer better equipped to interrogate the fantasies of cosmopolitan elites.

O’Neill alternates first-person narration between Lakesha and Mark. Mark’s a beautifully drawn character: gullible, stuck inside his own head, but animated by love for his spouse and Fizzy and a late-flowering ambition that sparks his pursuit. He philosophizes on leftist political theory, a habit left over from undergraduate bull sessions. He’s more provincial than he’ll ever understand, but not without his charms, crisscrossing Europe with Whitmanian flair. “Bring on the City of Light. Bring on the Champs-Élysées and the Eiffel Tower. Roll on, you croissants and you croque-monsieur and you crèmes brûlées.”

By contrast Lakesha’s chapters seem bland. She, too, grapples with the contradictions of race, the startling vacuity of well-intentioned white people, but O’Neill never rounds her out. She offers respite from Mark’s self-absorption — her handling of The Group’s prickly personalities rings true for anyone who’s toiled in an office — but her speech comes off as robotic at times.

The book’s second half tacks back to the African hinterland, stories embedded within stories, Scheherazade-like, sideshows that delight. Mark and Geoff’s mother, Faye, surfaces, spurred on by greed.

Has O’Neill written the great soccer novel? “Godwin” is chock-full of lore, famous legends jostling next to esoteric figures; its arc reveals how the sport connects humanity globally as surely as the internet. But it’s also a parable of the powerful and powerless. The Frenchman delivers a tutorial on a region roiled by religious conflicts and guerilla organizations such as Al Qaeda and Boko Haram. “Children in Benin, alleges Lefebvre, are still sent away by their parents to work in faraway places — for example, the cobalt mines of Congo — in return for money, usually a monthly payment. It is illegal, but the police don’t, or can’t, do anything about it. Many of these disappeared children have no official identity, because their birth, especially in rural areas, is unregistered.” Plagues — whether Ebola, poverty, or slavery — are just a village away.

And it takes a village to raise a superstar. I won’t disclose “Godwin”’s final act; suffice to say O’Neill has produced a dense yet rollicking tale that rises above the literary competition, slapstick and funny but deadly serious, an indictment of how we live now. “Who isn’t vicious?” Mark opines. “It’s the capacity for viciousness that separates humans from the animals.”

GODWIN

By Joseph O’Neill

Pantheon, 299 pp., $28

Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, “This Boy’s Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.”