Actually Pretty Good: Godwin

On Joseph O'Neill's international football wild goose chase

Amid all the statistics, indexes and numbers that are supposed to explain ‘how the economy is doing,’ there are certain intangible phenomena that more accurately explain the malaise that hangs over work in America. The most important, I’d argue, is underemployment: more and more Americans get college degrees than ever, but the job market hasn’t really found a good place to put all of those graduates. Sure, a fresh-faced graduate can get a job, but something that makes use of the skills they developed in school – in an ideal world, complex thought, erudition, worldliness, a well-developed screen for bullshit, general intelligence – is pretty hard to find. Instead, the highly-educated worker settles in and, at best, gets to organize spreadsheets, file reports, increase shareholder wealth. In exchange for their work being, well, boring (or bullshit!) they get healthcare, a stable paycheck, and maybe a 401(k). Listen to your standard CEO of a big company talk for five minutes and you’ll know that, nine times out of ten, the actual smartest person at the company is outside the C-suite, terminally intelligent in a way that keeps them a couple rungs down the corporate ladder. (Not to mention the proximity to evil that comes with extreme wealth.) That genius friend of yours from that one class is a burnt out adjunct now, and the best writer in your workshop is an in-house copywriter by day, struggling artist when they have the time. Those at the top will call you bitter for saying so, insist its a meritocracy, you just have to work a little harder; enough experience will tell you it’s a lot more about luck, circumstances, connections, and how the chips fall. As Thomas Pynchon once wrote: “Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.” Spin the wheel of labor discourse and most of what you’ll land on – burnout, email jobs, ‘former gifted student’ syndrome, ‘nobody wants to work,’ four day work week, fake job postings, the end (or zombified life) of remote work – is tied, in some way, to widespread underemployment, a surfeit of skilled workers being rammed into extremely square holes. To rub insult into drudgery, morons (with a Cs get degrees dipoma or no) are out there getting richer than those poor office drones: they bought Bitcoin back in 2010, they flipped some NFTs during the bubble, they pumped up Gamestop during that other bubble, their buddy wrote this program that makes a killing in arbitrage markets, they made 401k on a fifteen leg parlay.

Joseph O’Neill’s new novel Godwin is about a lot of things, but the bristling undercurrent of the novel is about underemployment, about a deep-seated resentment that grows as the years wear a smart person down. It’s narrated by two technical / medical writers who work at an independent contractor’s collective in Pittsburgh; Lakesha Williams helps run it (for a too-modest paycheck) and Mark Wolfe is one the writers she helps connect with clients (for a steady if unremarkable yearly take-home). Mark is a bit too smart for his own good, a bit too convinced he should be the center of attention, and does just enough to get by, feeling as if the work of writing grant proposals and jargon heavy explainers is beneath him. Lakesha is similarly brilliant, but coming from poverty, is a bit more appreciative of the stable (if somewhat sterile) life she’s achieved with the company, though there are intimations within the text that hint at a yearning for a bit more from life. Mark gets in trouble at work for popping off at a security guard (there’s that bubbling resentment) and is gently ‘asked’ to use some of his stored up vacation days. Initially resentful at the idea, Mark changes his tune when he receives an SOS call from his idiot half-brother, Geoff, who lives in England and needs Mark’s help on a shady business proposition. Geoff’s plan involves tracking down Godwin, an African soccer prospect with a dazzling if grainy highlight reel, and becoming his agent. Everyone who sees the footage of Godwin has visions of the next Lionel Messi, with just one hitch: no one knows where the kid actually is. Theoretically, someone who could find Godwin and shepherd him through the world of international football would stand to make a lot of money, and so we get a kind of Conrad-ian venture into the African interior in order to possibly tap this rich vein. Boiled down to its essence, the plot follows Mark on a wild goose chase towards a moronic but lucrative business venture; if the idiots can get rich, why not him?

But how stupid can I be? I’m in possession of an actionable world-exclusive video of an athlete with potential career earnings in the hundreds of millions. His representatives would make millions every year. True, I don’t know much about the soccer business; but, with all due respect, if someone like Geoff is the competition, how hard can the business be? I can outsmart these people. If and when I need specialized advice, I’ll hire specialists – lawyers, image-rights people, subagents. Why would I turn my back on such an opportunity? It’s true that becoming a millionaire is something I’ve never seriously contemplated, and in fact have always held in contempt. Money and greed for money are the sources of almost all evil. For years I challenged capitalism; for years I turned my back on personal gain. I’ve paid my dues, you could say. And I have a family to support. My financial obligations are as real as the next guy’s. I have as much right as anyone to a measure of material prosperity – a greater right, arguably, because I would be a conscientious and charitable custodian of my wealth who could be counted on to pay my fair share of taxes.

Mark’s characteristic mix of intelligence, self-regard, and flexible ethics are on full display in this passage, as well as a bit of his belief in a orderly world of logic, of frictionless work done by a cascading series of hired “specialists” who give “specialized advice.” Couched in a bit of woe-is-me justification for his greed becoming more and more rapacious is the naive or extremely blinkered notion that he is somehow different, would responsibly pay his “fair share” of taxes rather than hire some other specialists to lower that tax bill. (Taxes, famously, were the one thing Messi got in trouble over!) All of Mark’s misguided notions about how this will all go are upended by the machinations of a real operator, the French football scout Jean-Luc Lefebvre, who shows Mark and Geoff how things really go – the pure skullduggery of capitalism, the line of middlemen who grease wheels all the way down, the ways in which one must dirty their hands to get a piece of the pie. Lefebvre is long-winded, self-obsessed, a very European kind of racist, but he undeniably has the eye for talent and the will to get deals over the finish line. A former player who had his career cut short by injury, Lefebvre has transitioned to playing the field of capital with the same ruthless eye: “Elite football is a business without mercy. It is a zone of objectivity. It is not a zone of sympathy, of equality. There is no room on the football field for the deserving case. A scout must wear blinders, like a horse.”

In the spirit of Conrad, O’Neill fills his novel with misdirection, ornate narrative framing, and various off-stage happenings that are only later narrated secondhand (or barely glanced over.) Lefebvre is an obvious Charles Marlow-esque figure, showing up in obscure corners with long, winding stories of colonial conquest; more subtly, the almost flat affect of Lakesha’s chapters are a kind of transmission from the solid, normal world that Mark feels stifled by, a series of petty domestic dramas in contrast to Mark’s globetrotting schema. Far from the realist that other reviewers peg O’Neill as – Zadie Smith most famously back when Netherland came out and she compared O’Neill to Tom McCarthy, but also A.O. Scott and Ryu Spaeth in their Godwin reviews – his mode is more akin to a modernist assemblage of highly compromised voices, stories being told around an ecstatic truth. Conrad is the master of this, and not many are working in this tradition anymore; what O’Neill brings to the party, via his ventriloquist act, is a sense of humor and an un-self-conscious intelligence on the page. Geoff is one of the best comedic characters in recent contemporary fiction; a ne’er do well white guy on crutches hobbling around England speaking in a ridiculous patois – all “bluds,” “bruvs” and “fams,” confidently dispensing truisms like “In England, yeah, man would be knocking back the tequilas. Not here. These man look after themselves” – and trying to hustle low level deals while also keeping his head in the clouds of untold future riches. (Eventually he is literally revealed to be in the business of shit - guano, to be exact.) When Mark first arrives in England, his brother puts him up not in a hotel or his own place, but in the house of one of his juvenile potential clients. He never pays for anything, and expects his and Mark’s weak family tie to paper over it; it’s only Mark’s growing avarice that keeps them connected after Geoff’s continual monetary dodges. Putting a bumbling character like this up against a canny and somewhat diabolical businessman like Lefebvre make for a kind of dialectical feast, a deep immersion in two very distinct voices, both hemming in on Mark’s own world weary and somehow still plaintive point of view.

In other lines and moments, O’Neills alchemical mix of humor and intelligence shine through: Mark’s depiction of JFK airport as “an airport so chaotic, ragged, and superfluously authoritarian in character that it contradicts [his] understanding that this is the First World,” Lakesha’s imagining of an ex-coworker, Annie, “in Sacramento, a place I’ve never been to, and in the image Sacramento was lit up by a dazzling sunshine, and Annie was always on her way to an outdoor restaurant where everybody was wearing sunglasses and eating a never-ending brunch,” or Lefebvre , in his typical gasbaggy way, encountering an American tourist in Africa and hoping that she “would have grasped that there was nothing to be done, by her, about the ancient structures that determined the meaning of life in this continent, as they did in any other. Rare is the society, past or present, north or south, Lefebvre intones somberly, that is not characterized by brutality, domination, injustice.” The tone, throughout, is a kind of perfectly modulated irony, never falling into cheap cynicism or compensatory maudlinness. O’Neill makes these people funny, and a bit ridiculous, but there is also a deep sympathy for these strivers who think, misguidedly or not, that they are doing the right thing, and sometimes even try to do it, or wrench the world so as to seem like they’re doing it. As in most tragedies, though, the world has other ideas for them.

In European football, a game can end in a draw, and everyone goes home a bit disappointed but at least with something to show for it; it’s only in America where there must be a winner taking all. In Godwin, as in Netherland, O’Neill uses sports as a lens with which to examine larger systems, most notably capital and its discontents. I won’t try to ape O’Neill’s detailed analyses, or deny you the readerly pleasure of discovering them yourself, but suffice to say Godwin posits a world with a couple winners and many, many losers, those losses ranging from cosmic to quotidian. It is exactly that American obsession with winning at all costs that leads to so many personal disasters; we are the nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, after all. A fulfilling life not tied to income, qualified successes, the points, as it were, shared equally, might not be too bad. If a college degree can’t teach you that, enough living will do the trick, hopefully before it’s too late. Or you can just hit that parlay - trust me, I’ve got an absolute lock, we’ll leave these rubes behind in no time…

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Thanks to paid subscriber Dave B. for recommending this one to me!

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