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.
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.
