GODWIN

A sports agent’s pursuit of a soccer prodigy stirs up old family resentments.

O’Neill’s breakthrough novel, Netherland (2008), was partly a paean to cricket and tracked one character’s quest to build an arena in Brooklyn. Here the sport is soccer and the holy grail is an elusive young player who’s somewhere in Africa. None of that is evident as the book opens with a chapter narrated by Lakesha Williams, co-founder of a technical-writing cooperative in Pittsburgh, who faces an HR challenge with a fractious colleague named Mark Wolfe. It’s only in the next chapter, narrated by Mark (he and Lakesha alternate), that we learn of his younger half brother, Geoffrey Anibal, who’s begging Mark for help in locating the prodigy—named Godwin, as if to suggest what a prize he could be. Geoff is a fledgling sports agent and a bit of a con man looking to kick-start a career and a fortune. Mark feels their mother not only neglected him but also cheated him out of an inheritance. O’Neill has a gift for finding humor in emotional stress, and it shines in the two men’s confrontations and in the co-op’s increasingly tense office politics. The semi-siblings bring in a third potential ally for their Godwin campaign, a veteran French soccer agent named Jean-Luc Lefebvre. The three go through twists and turns, culminating in an African odyssey—rendered by Lefebvre in an astonishing marathon of storytelling—that highlights the avarice of sports recruitment and the legacy of colonialism. Along with these banner themes are the overarching questions: How should we treat each other and how do we deal with mistreatment, on any scale? While the Lakesha and Mark narratives both serve these themes, some readers may struggle with how disparate the story lines remain until a late and surprising convergence. But then good stories often rely on delayed gratification.

Another exceptional entry in the O’Neill corpus.