Reality Check

Joseph O'Neill's realist novel embodies the best and worst of the genre.

- Ryu Spaeth

GODWIN BY JOSEPH O'NEILL. PANTHEON.

IN 2008, Zadie Smith wrote in The New York Review of Books that there were "two paths for the novel." One was represented by Tom McCarthy's Remainder, about a man who wakes from an accident-induced coma to find that he no longer understands the world around him. The other path was epitomized by Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, about a rudderless financier in post-9/11 New York who is estranged from his wife and finds direction and meaning in the pals he makes playing cricket on the weekends. Smith praised Remainder as an avant-garde exploration of the limits of language and perception. She took issue with Netherland for being a flawless example of what she called lyrical realism, the mode of novel writing that has dominated the form, with some notable interruptions, since the 19th century and that smugly assumes reality, as experienced subjectively by human beings, is a knowable, stable thing. "In Netherland," she wrote, "only one's own subjectivity is really authentic."

In the years since Smith's essay, the half-Irish, half-Turkish O'Neill, who has lived in Mozambique, Iran, Turkey, and Holland, published a satire of global finance set in Dubai and a collection of short stories. Now residing in New York, the 60-year-old is putting out his first novel in ten years, Godwin, about a dissatisfied middle-aged father from Pittsburgh who may have discovered an African soccer prodigy. It's an exercise in realism by one of its finer contemporary disciples that displays many of the same limits that sparked autofiction's resurgence, revealing a form stuck in time. Yet this book also has many reminders of why realism remains so appealing.