Nobody else’s fiction tears up the ground quite like O’Neill’s profoundly introspective novels ... In their careful braiding of anxiety and aspiration, his stories are marvels of narrative magic and stylistic panache ... As always, O’Neill is experimenting with how stories are spun within stories. There’s an absurdist quality to this quest ... This novelist is a player whose charges and feints will leave you amazed — and defeated.
Exuberant...caper ... Has O’Neill written the great soccer novel? Godwin is chock-full of lore, famous legends jostling next to esoteric figures; its arc reveals how the sport connects humanity globally as surely as the internet. But it’s also a parable of the powerful and powerless ... Suffice to say O’Neill has produced a dense yet rollicking tale that rises above the literary competition, slapstick and funny but deadly serious, an indictment of how we live now.
Sharp, stimulating ... O’Neill advances the parallel stories briskly and energetically, having reined in the penchant for philosophical woolgathering ... After a series of twists, the plotlines are skillfully tied together in a surprising finale. But what is most satisfying about Godwin is the range of its interests and themes. Mr. O’Neill is a capable satirist but is also good at quick, affecting secondary character sketches.
Sharp and slippery ... 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 ... 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.
What has been a terrific novel so far goes completely off the rails, culminating in one of the most absurd endings I’ve read in some time ... I would have preferred O’Neill to be less anxious ... There is a fine line between self-consciousness and self-doubt, and it is all too easy to fall into the latter.
The author has made some odd narrative choices that arguably dissipate the book’s great potential ... Devoid of...romanticism, laying bare the remorseless economic reality behind the fantasy. But that also makes the writing somewhat businesslike, effective but rarely memorable.
O’Neill’s storytelling here has an enthralling fireside quality, ushering us with deceptive simplicity into a labyrinth of motive and desire, breathtaking betrayals and artfully twined threads. A book to sink into, in other words, and one not to be missed.
O’Neill has added a new and moving take on his usual tale of masculine doom, which gives this deceptively light comic novel a subtly profound undertow ... It’s all enjoyable ... By the end, O’Neill has migrated the narrative away from Wolfe’s male funk and into something utterly surprising and female, and it’s great.
Highly original comic caper ... O’Neill is a natural storyteller, with his flair for winding narratives on display in Godwin. There are many stories within stories in the complex, nimble and sometimes dazzling structure of the book. He has the storyteller’s eye for detail too ... There is the sense we are learning as we read, a whirlwind tour of African politics, office politics and football but, as with the best teachers, O’Neill distracts us with enough drama, humour and humanity to make it feel as if it’s no lesson at all.
Though quietly absorbing, in a thriller-ish way, the novel is slightly let down by a dreary subplot narrated from the point of view of Wolfe’s colleague, Lakesha, centring on intrigue at their workplace ... The two narrative strands do eventually intertwine but the office drama feels removed from the main story, and is much less compelling.
Intellectually challenging ... The book is really about power: those who have it, those who don’t and those who scheme to get it. O’Neill’s excellent novel builds to a cynical ending that may not comfort, but it’s an undeniably appropriate finish to a story of what can happen when idealism snags on the lure of capitalism.
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.
