Scramble for Power

A search for an African soccer prodigy animates a novel about capitalism and its colonial legacies.

GODWIN

By Joseph O’Neill

Pantheon. 288 pp. $28.

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 firstperson 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.

To Lakesha, Mark is an ambiguous figure in a dark workplace comedy that escalates into a farce of organizational toxicity. Her portion of “Godwin” mostly chronicles the unraveling of the Group and the testing of her own idealism, as turf battles and procedural squabbles turn into a nasty power struggle waged in memos and meetings. As a Black woman in a mostly white professional setting, she suffers her own crisis of dignity, undermined by colleagues she can’t quite bring herself to accuse of racism. (One of them, an ostensible ally, calls her “Queen Lakesha.”)

Mark doesn’t think much about Lakesha at all, and lays claim to the more dramatic, attention-grabbing, overtly ambitious sections of the novel. Like “Netherland,” O’Neill’s sprawling tale of cricket and exile in post-9/11 New York, “Godwin” uses sports as a window on global realities that might otherwise be too vast or too abstract to perceive. This time, the sport is soccer, which draws Mark into a shadowy, transactional world of late-capitalist, post-colonial intrigue.

Not that he plays the game. Mark’s half brother, Geoff, a wildly unreliable fellow whose hip-hop-Cockney affectations (“bruv,” “fam,” “fing”) recall Ali G, fancies himself a football scout. He is in possession of a video clip showing a young prodigy “somewhere in Africa” performing feats that defy description. This is Godwin, who Geoff thinks might be the next Lionel Messi. “That’s quality like I’ve never seen, blud, I can’t lie,” he tells his brother.

AS IT TURNS OUT, Geoff can lie as easily as he breathes. But Mark, aware of Godwin’s talent and driven by his own restlessness, finds himself drawn into an elaborate, shady recruitment scheme to bring the boy to the West, where fame and fortune await, along with finder’s fees and agent’s percentages.

Is Godwin the protagonist of “Godwin”? For most of the novel, he’s more like the titular figures in “Moby-Dick” and “The Maltese Falcon”: a symbol, a motive, a red herring. Even as he upends Mark’s life — and eventually Lakesha’s too — Godwin himself is a blank space on the novel’s map, his experience a boundary the reader is forbidden to cross.

Mark’s attempts to find him, assisted by geolocation technology and a louche French talent scout named Jean Lefebvre, send the novel toward modern-day Joseph Conrad territory. Not only because it follows arrogant Westerners on a quasi-imperial adventure into Africa, but also because it is conveyed through.

layers of hearsay and indirection, a technique Conrad used in “Heart of Darkness” and elsewhere. The most vivid and consequential episodes are related in hindsight and at second hand, as a story told by Lefebvre to Mark, and then by Mark (via O’Neill) to us.

Are any of these narrators reliable? Lefebvre is a throwback, a fountain of retrograde notions about race, gender and geography. “The African concept of truth,” he tells Mark, “does not correspond to the European concept. In Africa, people say whatever is most profitable.” Mark, in spite of possessing “plywood shelves crammed with double rows of books about philosophy and politics and theory,” finds himself unable to argue. Lefebvre, he thinks, “might as well produce the head of a rhinoceros and mount it on our wall.”

There may be no such rhino, but “Godwin” is a room full of elephants: racism and the sensitivity to it, colonialism and the legacy of it, capitalism and the impossibility of seeing beyond it. Even Mark, with all those books, doesn’t know how to talk about those things. Lakesha is too busy, too beleaguered by the trolls threatening to take over the Group.

For his part, O’Neill practices an artful sleight of hand. The stakes in “Godwin” — to Lakesha, to Mark, to Godwin, to O’Neill — feel both enormous and elusive. The book bristles with offhand insights and deft portraits of peripheral characters. It is populous, lively and intellectually challenging, but also coy and not a little cagey, concealing the ball with intricate footwork and sly misdirection as it risks running out the clock of readerly patience.

Like much recent fiction, “Godwin” takes place not in a generalized present but at a specific moment in the fast-receding past: 2015, to be exact. The signs of the times flicker by — the Charlie Hebdo massacre is mentioned a few times — but their meaning is withheld until the very last page, when a sour punchline nearly turns the whole thing into a sad shaggydog story. I wanted more — more of a reason to have cared about Lakesha and Mark, two of the more memorably vexed and vexatious fictional characters I’ve encountered in a while. This is a very smart book. I’m not sure that’s a compliment.