Belinda McKeon at Literary Hub:
What kind of world is this? That’s the question prompted over and over by Joseph O’Neill’s new novel Godwin, a novel which is ostensibly about soccer, and the soccer industry, but is really about nothing less than the value of a human life. Godwin is a West African teenager whose talent with a football is, in the words of the character who views it on a bootleg video file, “perceptually alien.” When this boy plays, it seems as though “a hidden dimension of human movement, of the relationship between gravity and physiology, is being revealed.” That video file makes many promises, and all of them have to do with money, and all of them have to do with the relationship between power and vulnerability.
In his narrator, Mark Wolfe, a technical writer from Pittsburgh who finds himself drawn into the search for Godwin via his hustler brother, O’Neill has created a character of marvelous and often maddening complexity: Wolfe is at once an everyman and an idiot, an introvert and an opportunist, at whom the reader wants to scream sit down, be happy with your lot, but who will never listen.
More here.