Not So Bad Guys

In another era the men at the center of Joseph O’Neill’s novels might have made good spies. His protagonists are men adrift—unmoored from their families and belonging in no one place, they move across the globe with ease, acquiring no particular loyalties and demanding no more than handsome payment. See: Hans van den Broek, the Dutch banker from London who is stranded in New York when his wife absconds in Netherland (2008), or the unnamed narrator of The Dog (2014), a Swiss American lawyer who has fled the emotional wreckage of a nine-year relationship to work for a stratospherically rich Lebanese family in Dubai.

Despite their ample resources (Hans rents a bachelor pad for $6,000 a month—in 2002!), these men act as if they had little say in the direction of their own lives. Major global disturbances dictate their paths—a post–September 11 malaise prompts the breakdown of Hans’s marriage; the unfettered flow of capital to Dubai sweeps up The Dog’s lawyer. Caught in these currents, they are helpless to do much more than trade oil futures or launder money for oligarchs. Sentimental and self-important, they flail at home. (The narrator of the 2018 story “The Poltroon Husband” can tell us the etymology of the word “poltroon,” meaning “utter coward,” but lingers upstairs as his wife investigates a potential break-in at their house.) They are fluent in ornamented prose but unable to communicate their simplest wants, and like schoolboys they are most serious about games: golf in This Is the Life (1991), diving in The Dog, and cricket in Netherland.

The great pleasure of these books is that they feel spacious, touched with adventure and international intrigue, even though they are confined so narrowly to the perspective of middle-aged law and finance guys. This is partly because O’Neill—who is half-Irish and half-Turkish, grew up in Iran, Mozambique, and the Netherlands, practiced as a barrister in England, and now lives in Brooklyn—is interested not just in “how a character gets on with his Auntie” but “where the characters stand in relation to the world,” as he told The Paris Review Daily in a 2014 interview. A novelist with “no home turf,” he has an unusual gift for making his sad, sententious narrators the representatives of era-defining upheavals. Critics have tended to go for this in a big way or not at all: Netherland mapped Hans’s inner life so adeptly that Zadie Smith lamented feeling “a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition” and saw in it the end of the road for the realist novel (“It seems perfectly done—in a sense that’s the problem,” she wrote in her celebrated essay “Two Paths for the Novel”^*); James Wood in The New Yorker called it “one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read.”

To the extent that these were political novels, they were studies of social decline and the tremors that overpaid professionals experienced along the way. Although O’Neill has written much about US politics and party strategy in these pages over the past five years, in his fiction he has rarely imagined characters who take even the slightest form of political action. In fact, O’Neill’s protagonists flagrantly shirk any such obligations. (From The Dog: “Because I accept as a given that Dubai laborers are very badly treated, I don’t owe it to the laborers to take steps to find out about exactly what kind of mistreatment they suffer from.”) They inhabit cutely named personal fantasy worlds: “Netherland,” “abracadabrapolis,” “the Perhapsburg empire,” wishful little mirages of individual freedom.

O’Neill’s new novel, Godwin, appears deceptively similar to those works—a middle-aged technical writer named Mark Wolfe makes a foray into the shady world of international soccer scouting, from Pittsburgh to London to Paris to Benin to Milwaukee—and most reviews, both favorable and critical, have read the book this way. Yet it’s not clear that Mark, who is one of the novel’s two narrators, is even the central character of this story, the person through whom we are to understand its moment. Perhaps reflecting O’Neill’s increasing interest in both the willpower and the procedures needed to sustain a healthy body politic, Godwin doesn’t just trace Mark’s ill-conceived picaresque but also tells a parallel story about idealism; its larger question is what it would take to construct a more generously and sanely ordered world—who puts in the work to that end, what threatens such projects, and what responsibility someone like Mark bears for their success or failure.

Mark’s story (which alternates with that of his colleague Lakesha) has all the familiar and alluring elements of an O’Neill novel. Mark is a man whose blond hair is turning white, a figure haunted by a distinct sense that his best years are behind him. He has woman trouble, this time not with his wife (a thoughtful and drama-free person) but with his slippery, acquisitive mother, Faye. His backstory has a typically international flavor: Faye left him with his father in Pittsburgh as a child, when she ran away with her French lover to England—as a result Mark appears somewhat out of place in America, with one eye trained on distant parts. It perhaps works in the novel’s favor, too, that at its center we have soccer, the most popular game in the world.

Then there’s the fineness of Mark’s inner turmoil, an O’Neill signature. Mark is less given to nostalgic reverie than Hans and less in love with verbiage than the narrator of The Dog. We meet him at a “dark and brittle time.” He is undergoing a “crisis of dignity” common to men who feel stuck, expressing itself in “a kind of ongoing indignation—a tendency to take offense,” Lakesha thinks. His immediate frustrations are comically petty. He takes a stand against the world by diligently avoiding his coworkers: “I don’t like spending my day under the surveillance of others, however friendly the surveyors may imagine themselves to be.” Yet Mark understands his darkness as a grander and more mysterious state: “I was more than a little sick of the taste of life,” he professes, declaring himself rankled by examples all around him of “stupidity that’s purposeful and communicable and strangely greedy.”

Unlike other O’Neill protagonists, Mark has not managed to cash in on this stupidity. Of the several dozen technical writers he works alongside, he is among the lowest earners. His devotion to intellectual and artistic labors might have made up for the shortage of money when he was younger, but those pursuits have lost their flavor, too, so that his collection of books no longer represents “a fortress of knowledge” but “a kind of mausoleum of my mental life, books I haven’t opened in years, in part because I cannot face the underscores and the marginalia, made in my neater handwriting of those days.” He is, in other words, ready to throw out his loosely held ideals and go all in on a get-rich-quick scheme, of the sort that his unscrupulous younger brother, Geoff, soon proposes.

Geoff is a soccer scout and manager with suspiciously few clients. He has purchased, or perhaps stolen, video clips of an exceptionally talented young player about whom he knows nothing—he calls him Godwin, though that might not be his actual name, and he has no clue where the video is shot except that it’s probably “somewhere in West Africa.” Geoff flies Mark to London, where he tells him to find the boy so that he can secure the rights to manage him and set him up for a lucrative career.

The highlights of this search take us to some delightfully shadowy and unglamorous corners of the soccer economy—as when Mark visits the soccer management guru Jean-Luc Lefebvre at his scruffy semidetached house outside Paris; or when Geoff drags Mark to the VIP room of a desolate nightclub and bangs on about a guy named “Posh Hugh”; or when Geoff departs without warning to focus on a different far-flung scheme (“the Mauritania thing”); or when Mark decides to double-cross his double-crossing brother and pursue the whole Godwin business without him. “There are sharks out there,” he thinks. “Also: I am at the peak of my powers. It’s my time.”

These episodes, like much of Godwin, are not really concerned with soccer and are certainly not about Godwin, who largely serves as a MacGuffin. An advantage of telling this story through the life of an American with no particular feel for soccer is that the reader is not required to understand the industry insiders’ occasional disquisitions on the game and its players any more than our narrator himself does. Mark’s story is ultimately about proving himself, if rather late in life. (An older man “becomes, if anything, more desperate for success—for a sign that one’s life has not been lived in vain,” he thinks.) Mark aims to show that he is savvy enough not just to pull off a conventional international business deal (as Hans the oil analyst might) but to navigate the informal networks of handlers and fixers to beat his own path through a continent he knows little about. Whereas Hans and the narrator of The Dog got rich off neoliberal capital flows from behind their desks, Mark has a bluntly neocolonial plan. His dream is to reap enormous profits from the extraction of raw materials—in this case, of supposedly raw soccer talent.

If Mark actually ended up going on that expedition, Godwin would be both a more adventure-filled and a more predictable novel—Mark imagines it as a buddy comedy with him and Lefebvre (now his partner) “squabbling over the window seat on the plane to Cotonou.” But for all his illusions of success, Mark wakes one day to find that Lefebvre has gone ahead without him. Before we are halfway through the novel, Mark is back in Pittsburgh, and O’Neill turns his attention to Lakesha’s story, which focuses on the office politics among the technical writers.

This switch is abrupt, and it could be read in a couple of different ways. One reading, which Ryu Spaeth put forward in a recent review in New York, is that O’Neill lost his nerve and decided to sidestep the difficulties of depicting “a poverty-stricken nation through two characters who are not exactly the best equipped to understand it.” Only later in the novel do we hear how Lefebvre ultimately finds Godwin in Benin, when he visits Mark in Pittsburgh and regales him with painfully tin-eared tales of his trip. Certainly, this technique puts O’Neill’s narrator at a distance from the venture, framing the whole thing explicitly as the account of a racist Frenchman, and allowing him to voice disapproval of “this guy who has returned from Africa with hunting trophies in the form of stories.”

But I do not think the choice to send Mark home early deprives us of the more exciting book that might have been, or even that Mark’s sections as they stand are “the more dramatic” or “ambitious” parts of the novel, as A.O. Scott suggested in The New York Times. That’s because Lakesha Williams, not Mark Wolfe, is the central character in Godwin. The novel both opens and closes in Lakesha’s voice, and her sections swerve into more unexpected, sometimes even more absurd, territory than his do. Godwin is not primarily a familiar O’Neillian story of sports-infused international intrigue but an American workplace drama—a genre uniquely suited to drawing out the ways we can either make life more bearable for one another or inflict cruelty through all-consuming power struggles.

Lakesha is something new in O’Neill’s fiction: a character who wants better things but recognizes that it will take slow, steady effort and the often exasperating work of collaboration to make them happen. Lakesha is a technical writer living in Pittsburgh and specializing in medical literature. Several years before the beginning of the novel she cofounded the Group—a workers’ cooperative that provides members with a sensible set of benefits and chugs along according to a sensible set of rules. “The term ‘freelance’ sounds good,” Lakesha points out evenhandedly, “but most folks find the reality stressful and not at all ‘free.’” For a fee, the Group gives like-minded technical writers access to office space, billing and fee-negotiation services, a “brand presence,” and a community.

The Group has had its fair share of bumps, though Lakesha has tended to smooth them quietly. Members are supposed to split the cleaning of the office, for instance, but an irksome writer named Edil spends more of her shift chatting than mopping the floor. Lakesha simply waits for her to leave: “Then I cleaned the floor properly.” Although the members are all equal and all vote on the Group’s officers and policies, Lakesha and her cofounder shoulder the Group’s significant administrative duties for nominal pay. “Idealism, if it’s real, means extra work,” she thinks. She takes pride in the bright, hip office, a converted former can factory with open spaces where you can “noodle on a laptop or hang out,” and she speaks of the Group’s Constitution, Rules, and Guidelines for Co-Operators with a calm satisfaction. Through her efforts, the Group seems to have taken much of the “risk, hassle, and social isolation” out of work and to have pulled off a remarkable feat of self-governance. Like some idealized social democracy, their little collective functions so well that it’s rather boring. Why can’t everything run this effectively?

Part of the answer is that a few bad actors ruin it for the rest of us. Edil is the chaos agent who hijacks the Group’s elections to install a set of inexperienced and unpopular officers on the board, through an elaborate scheme that gives her control over absentee ballots. (Voter fraud!) Lakesha, the sole remaining member of the old regime, has to serve awkwardly along with the new cadre, who begin questioning her past practices, leveling accusations of self-dealing and corruption that escalate with alarming speed to an inquiry. The Group, once a source of pride, becomes a site of daily humiliation. Their mistreatment of her follows a familiar pattern: open hostility (a menacing text from Edil reads, “Please stay away from me and stay out of my business”), galling disregard for her expertise, a largely unspoken rejection of her as a highly accomplished Black woman in a position of authority.

But the Group’s crisis also has a lot to do with people like Mark, who don’t mean any harm and think of themselves as basically good, while having no intention of actually doing any good and rarely thinking about other people (except as potential antagonists to be shooed off their lawn). Lakesha sticks her neck out by attempting to help Mark when he acts inappropriately at work; when others think he should be disciplined, she opts to give him the benefit of the doubt and see if a friendly chat can clear things up. He rewards her by disappearing without notice (on the first leg of his soon-to-fail Godwin mission) and leaving the impression that she gave him undeserved special treatment. Later, when Lakesha faces the inquiry and he is well positioned to help her, he expresses faint sympathy, then flakes.

In Lakesha and Mark, O’Neill sketches the tension between two types of liberal, who are ostensibly on the same side but have markedly different priorities and can’t in fact work that well together. This is the divide, as Lakesha sees it:

I had always been a practical, down-to-earth person, and never a leftist in the way of some people I knew—full of theoretical passions, full of abstract anger and hope, seeing themselves as protagonists in a drama of ideals. Wolfe was something like that. But I did respond idealistically to the co-operative movement.

Not just practical, Lakesha is invested in the common good to the point of literal selflessness; her neutral, measured tone is stripped of self-indulgent flourishes, and her beliefs are untouched by strong passions. (“It’s nice to believe that we have admirable workmates,” she states. Later: “Surely a positive solidarity was possible.”) Mark is her opposite: he is intelligent enough to know right from wrong and excels at voicing his awareness of injustice, but has no real commitments. Initially disapproving of the plan to find and exploit Godwin, he comments: “Who am I, King Leopold of the Belgians?” Just a few pages later he declares in earnest, “I am off to Africa to seek my fortune.” Mark puts Mark first and flatters himself with stylish, aphoristic pronouncements: “The world is rotten. To step outside is to enter a vicious element.” Mark isn’t a saboteur like Edil; he’s just a liability.

O’Neill is too subtle a novelist to write characters who serve up their opinions on American politics and party leaders, as so many have since Trump’s election in 2016. Instead, the dynamics of the Group appear to dovetail with O’Neill’s diagnosis of the Democratic Party in the Biden era as simultaneously America’s best hope against fascism and a body “too corrupt and/or strategically misguided and/or enfeebled by hackery to consistently beat the Republicans,” as he put it in a New York Times profile in June. The Group doesn’t stand a chance so long as prominent members like Mark buckle at the first sign of difficulty. Most of Godwin is pointedly set in 2015, and even after Lakesha’s tribulations, she retains a painful sense of misplaced optimism. It would spoil the novel to go into detail about its risky closing pages, in which O’Neill bitterly and explicitly invokes electoral politics. But Lakesha delivers a final line laden with perhaps more dramatic irony even than the novel has prepared us for: “There is so much to look forward to.”

Who is Lakesha Williams? O’Neill’s white male main characters tend to pour out their souls in showy first-person narratives. Lakesha is careful with her words, declining to make her deepest feelings immediately available. If Netherland was, as Zadie Smith put it, “covered in language,” Lakesha’s sections of Godwin are pared all the way back. This can create the impression of a character not fully realized. Yet at times Lakesha’s preference for understatement conveys an immense disappointment more powerfully than Mark’s lyrical flights ever could. Of the troubles that have descended on her life’s work, she only says, “Disillusionment is such a hard state of mind to confess to, and folks don’t want to hear about it.”

Several of her asides hint that she has witnessed many more dramatic incidents than she tells us about in her narration, and that she has attempted to order her life precisely to avoid such embarrassing episodes. Before setting up the Group, she worked for a man named Dave who kept a pair of climbing gloves and “a length of new orange rope” in his office:

I knew Dave to be a kind boss, but it was nauseating to be in a room with a man wearing black gloves and holding a rope. It was a rappel rope, he said. If ever there was a catastrophic event, his plan was to exit through the window and rappel the five floors down to the street.

The Group was meant to be a refuge from the ego trips that often beset workplaces—skeletons in the supply closet, etc. O’Neill’s evocation of Lakesha’s steady institution-building efforts appears to train the reader’s attention on understated pleasures: the satisfaction of following a process in detail, of building something piece by piece—the kind of gratifying description that can often be found when a character furnishes a room or holes up to get some work done.

None of this is to say that Godwin idealizes Lakesha. As her story and Mark’s converge in new ways near the end of the novel, she stumbles into a personal quandary, one in which impeccable professional ethics offers no guidance. Even in her central drama at the Group, there are several moments when her devotion to procedure, her faith in following the rules, only makes her situation worse. At what point does high-mindedness become defenselessness? In the anecdote with Dave’s weird ropes and gloves Lakesha implies she was nauseated because she detected their kinky overtones, but maybe she was also repelled by their more literal meaning. Throughout the novel she is unwilling to equip herself for an emergency exit, to consider that sometimes the best option might be to cut one’s losses.

There’s a fecklessness in this attitude, too, less obvious than the adventurousness of Mark’s grand plans. If Mark can’t sign Godwin before his rivals do, he won’t get rich; if people like Lakesha can’t keep institutions from sliding into chaos, we know where that leads. Godwin is a novel that keeps flipping the reader’s expectations: the parts of the story that seem to involve the most daring are relatively inconsequential, and the parts that seem sensible, even a little sedate, matter in outsize ways. The ordinary stuff, it turns out, is perilous.