In 2006, journalist Franklin Foer published a nonfiction book, HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE WORLD: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. That title would have been an apt one for Joseph O’Neill’s latest novel, GODWIN, a delightful return to the form of NETHERLAND, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2009, and following the disappointment of THE DOG, his most recent novel from 2014. It centers on the search for a mysterious teenage soccer player from Africa. But with the “beautiful game” at its heart, it’s a smart, charming story about family, fame, fortune and the machinations of global capitalism in the 21st century.

The character Mark Wolfe connects the book’s two mostly independent narrative arcs. On the cusp of his 40th birthday, he works as a freelance technical writer for an organization known as the P4 Group, located in Pittsburgh. Married to Sushila, a woman of Sri Lankan ancestry, and with her the parent of a three-year-old daughter, apart from his obvious intelligence, Wolfe’s defining personality traits are a free-floating anxiety and a “vanity manifested as a kind of bigheaded obsession with personal obscurity.”

"[GODWIN] is a smart, charming story about family, fame, fortune and the machinations of global capitalism in the 21st century.... Though it would have been enjoyable to linger a bit longer in the world [O'Neill] has created, the visit there is a richly satisfying one."

Though the novel tilts more heavily toward Wolfe’s story, he shares narrative duties with Lakesha Williams, the Co-Lead of P4 Group, a loose collective of technical writers that possesses a “strong horizontal ethos,” an example of the corporate speak that peppers the members’ conversations. Like Wolfe, she’s an articulate voice, who seems to view holding together the occasionally fractious members of the Group as her principal job. When her fellow Co-Lead Annie departs, the group’s life devolves into a contest for control between peacemaker Lakesha and a rabble-rouser named Edil. In O’Neill’s hands, this satire of office politics is about as good as it gets, as he portrays Lakesha struggling to avoid a self-destructive entrapment in the organization’s lovingly fashioned and well-meaning but byzantine governing structure by her determined rival.

But at the novel’s heart is the race to find Godwin, who’s visible only on a poor quality video Wolfe views when he takes two weeks off from his technical writing --- a sort of leave of absence Lakesha suggests after a couple of incidents where he displays his “emotional instability and poor self-awareness.” He travels to London at the invitation of his half-brother, Geoff Anibal, who is 10 years younger than him.

Geoff is a stereotypical “bro” character. Fond of addressing Wolfe as “bruv” or “fam,” he urges his brother to collaborate with him on the search for Godwin, who possesses the “Z factor” he believes will make him the next Lionel Messi. In addition to being a “tornado of unreliability,” one of Geoff’s other fundamental flaws, in Wolfe’s eyes, is that he’s the favorite of their mother, Faye, whom Wolfe thinks of as an “ambush predator.” But his promises to fund Wolfe’s travels prove illusory, and it’s only when Wolfe connects with Jean-Luc Lefebvre, a former soccer player and coach who “never personally achieved anything of note” and now a works as a freelance scout, that the scavenger hunt-like search for Godwin (after some further machinations) picks up momentum.

Lefebvre is a classic example of what Graham Greene (in a novel set in Africa) called a “burnt-out case,” as well as something of an amateur philosopher when it comes to the game of soccer and the meaning of life. For anyone who has seen the movie Moneyball, he’s reminiscent of the old-time baseball scouts who are certain their ability to size up young talent is far superior to the data analytics approach of Oakland A’s management.

For this “simple man of football,” success in the game is all about “responsibility, fantasy, and simplicity,” though identifying those qualities is a “question of recognition, not a question of discovery.” It’s not merely his age and his overall world-weariness that mark him, it’s his sense that in the “complex, cutthroat business” of professional soccer, the world as he’s known it is passing away.

Lefebvre departs on a journey through the West African country of Benin, one of the world’s most impoverished nations, in the company of a cagey native named Fulbert, who acts as his tour guide even as he pursues his own agenda. O’Neill skillfully captures the abject poverty of that land, “the enormous wealth disparity between the continent of the whites and the continent of the Blacks,” its claustrophobic, often threatening atmosphere, and the labyrinthine course Lefebvre must negotiate successfully if he's to land his quarry and transport him to a country where, as is not the case in Godwin’s homeland, he has a chance of achieving soccer stardom.

Unlike the narrator of THE DOG, who I described in my review as “someone with whom it might be enjoyable to spend an evening at a bar, but by the end of this lengthy encounter, [one would] leave his company with a sense of relief,” the inside of Wolfe’s intelligent, sometimes hilariously self-aware mind is a highly entertaining place to be. That’s also true when the book's point of view shifts to the equally intriguing Lefebvre or Lakesha.

For a novel so intent on plumbing the interior lives of its small but fascinating collection of characters, O’Neill relies on a series of dramatic events to wrap up GODWIN in fairly cursory, if definitive, fashion. Though it would have been enjoyable to linger a bit longer in the world he has created, the visit there is a richly satisfying one.