Godwin

A Novel

By: Joseph O'Neill

Narrated by: Karen Chilton, Kirby Heyborne

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • From the acclaimed author of Netherland (a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the year): the odyssey of two brothers crossing the world in search of an African soccer prodigy who might change their fortunes.

Mark Wolfe, a brilliant if self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. His half-brother Geoff, born and raised in the United Kingdom, is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known only as “Godwin”—an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Lionel Messi.

Narrated in turn by Mark and his work colleague Lakesha Williams, Godwin is a tale of family and migration as well as an international adventure story that implicates the brothers in the beauty and ugliness of soccer, the perils and promises of international business, and the dark history of transatlantic money-making.

As only he can do, Joseph O’Neill investigates the legacy of colonialism in the context of family love, global capitalism, and the dreaming individual.

Interesting story...

Undecided on this one-- story interesting but farfetched and two pieces didn't really weave together as author intended. I didn't connect with narrators, especially female reader whose diction and tone was cold and arrogant, which seemed at odds with how her character was written...

Too many long pontificating asides

This could have been a good story but for the long pontifications. I disliked both narrators and almost quit multiple times.

Not Netherland.

I had loved O’Neill’s prior novel Netherland. It was fast paced, insightful about a subtle issue of hope and energy in the face of the realities of low skilled immigrants living with grace in spite of the multi-generational ladder they were painfully submitting to climb. I stopped listening about 25% into Godwin because its style and spirit were so distant from what I had come to expect. Maybe just a mismatch between the ground the author now wanted to explore and my nostalgia,, but the gap was too wide for me to navigate. By the way, what most remains with me from the audible experience was my deep dislike of the reader’s attempt to replicate the various accents of different characters portrayed across social and geographic landscapes as if we were listening to conversations between these (stereotyped) characters. It probably intensified the speed with which I figuratively closed the book.

A literary experiment gone wrong

The basic premise of searching and finding a rising soccer star in Africa held promise, but bifurcating the story with the boring minutiae of a boring business as a parallel story line ruined any potential for this book. In addition, most of the story is told as a retelling by the characters. This only makes the characters and actions more detached for the reader.