‘I write about sports; it’s what my head is filled with’

It’s rare to meet a writer as seemingly self-deprecating as Joseph O’Neill. Most have a healthy dose of ego, but when talking to O’Neill about his latest novel, Godwin, that’s the last thing that comes across.

First, he gets stressed “by verbal kinds of exchanges such as this one, because I know what happens: I always end up sounding like a complete idiot”. Next, he says he gets an idea for a novel only every 10 years or so and then writes them very slowly. And talking about Godwin is tricky because, as yet, he lacks a distanced critical relationship with it.

“I’m still sufficiently attached to the writer who was stumbling around making it happen, rather than the slightly sort of privileged interpreter, which the writer sometimes likes. Some writers can’t wait to get to that moment where they become the privileged interpreters of their books and they can point at things that went into it. I’m not that sort of writer. Maybe eventually ...”

Joseph O’Neill says one of his problems as a novelist is that he doesn’t have a particular culture to focus on.Credit: NYT

O’Neill, who has lived in New York for nearly 30 years, had a peripatetic early life, living in Ireland, Mozambique and Iran before moving with his Irish father and Turkish mother when he was six to the Netherlands. He has written a family memoir, Blood-Dark Track, about his two grandfathers, both of whom were imprisoned by the British during World War II, one for IRA activities and one on suspicion of espionage.

O’Neill shifted to England for university and eventually became a barrister, although he delayed going to the bar for a year to write his first novel, This is the Life, which came out in 1991. “I’ve always had this strong vocation [to write], but I have to confess that the vocation feels rather attenuated these days.”

It was his third novel, Netherland, championed by the likes of The New Yorker‘s James Wood – “consistently misread as a 9/11 novel, which stints what is most remarkable about it: that it is a postcolonial re-writing of The Great Gatsby,” Wood wrote – that really got him noticed. It made the longlist for the Booker Prize in 2008 and won the PEN/ Faulkner fiction award the following year.

He told this masthead at the time that he was embarrassed by the comparison to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, but did agree the book was “very much having a conversation with Gatsby”.

Netherland is about Hans, a Dutch man living in New York around the time of 9/11 and his friendship with Chuck Ramkissoon, a dodgy West Indian who introduces Hans to the Staten Island Cricket Club and entices him with a scheme to build a stadium for the sport in the city. Six years after Netherland came The Dog, set among the mega rich of Dubai and also longlisted for the Booker.

(O’Neill, incidentally, did for many years play cricket for the Staten Island club, remains a vice-president of it, and is also an international cricketer, having represented the Netherlands at under-19 level.)

Godwin is both a workplace novel and one about another of the sports O’Neill loves, football. It has two main narrators, Mark Wolfe, who works in a technical writing cooperative, and Lakesha Williams, the co-lead of said co-op.

Things aren’t going well for the frustrated Wolfe and when his dodgy English football agent half-brother Geoff tempts him with a get-rich scheme involving a teenage African Messi-type named Godwin, whose genius has been seen on video but whose location is unknown, he takes the bait.
The idea is to find Godwin and get him into a big European club so they can make a fortune in agents’ fees. To do that, Mark, at his brother’s instigation, falls in with Jean-Luc Lefebvre, a veteran French agent with far-reaching African connections and another narrator of the book.

O’Neill says he’s addicted to ball sports. “I write about sports because it’s what my head is filled with. You go with what you have.”

When O’Neill came up with the idea he was acutely aware of the African dimensions of the novel, but says it had to survive on its human dramas. “One of my problems as a novelist is that I don’t partake of a particular culture. It must be nice to be Philip Roth and to be constantly writing about New Jersey,” he says.

Does that give him more freedom? Perhaps and he points out that Godwin has a French narrator, a black American female narrator and “a slightly generic American white dude who is slightly deracinated in the way that the elite bourgeois culture deracinates people”.

But he’s tentative about seeing Netherland, The Dog and Godwin as a trilogy, although it’s clear that there are strong links in their postcolonial interests.

“Their action unfolds in specific places – New York, London, Dubai, Pittsburgh, France, Benin, and so on – but they don’t have that national identity that so many novels have. Rather they’re worldly novels, attentive to dramas and dreams that are peculiar to our migrant, mixed-up times.”

Slightly alarmingly, the crucial character of Lakesha appeared only in year six of a 10-year writing process; at the time he was getting a bit disgruntled with Wolfe’s voice. She made him anxious because “there was a kind of quite strong prohibition in the culture against that sort of imaginative gesture”. Now he says that chapter of turmoil has exhausted itself.

But he thinks Lakesha materialised because of what was going on at the time: a sense, as he puts it, of the US crashing, Brexit, the rise of the right and authoritarianism. “I did feel like the sort of civic virtues of collaboration, co-operation and mutual respect ... were no longer sustainable for reasons I didn’t fully understand.” Those are all qualities that Lakesha stands for in the fractious events at the cooperative.

If Netherland was in conversation in some ways with Gatsby, it’s arguable that Godwin has a similar relationship with Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, whom O’Neill sees as something of a rootless cosmopolitan who solved the question of not having a particular society to which he belonged by writing stories of the sea. There are echoes in the setting and in the way Godwin is narrated, particularly when Lefebvre is telling Wolfe of his trip to Benin to try to pin down the teenage talent.

If O’Neill’s vocation as a novelist does not feel as strong as it used to, that doesn’t mean he is not writing. He has become an increasingly active political commentator and has a very specific agenda on X (Twitter) and in the long articles he writes for The New York Review of Books.

As he wrote in one NYRB piece: “Somewhat unexpectedly, ensuring the success of the Democratic Party has become the most important political project in the world. The US remains the largest economy and superpower, and its constructive international leadership is essential if the climate crisis and other world-historical dangers are to be overcome. This can happen only if Democrats dominate the national government for the best part of the next 10 years or so.”

And writing there about the Kamala Harris “craze” this week, he said it reflected “the elation and hope and unleashed power of a party base unexpectedly freed from its gloom and despair. The ActBlue [grassroots Democrats] movement is back.”

We may have to wait a while for another novel from him.

Godwin is published by Fourth Estate at $32.99.

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