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, leading him to elaborately restage various episodes of his life in an attempt to create an experience that feels authentic. 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.”
A year after Smith’s essay appeared, Karl Ove Knausgård published the first volume of My Struggle, inaugurating an autofiction boom that both repudiated and affirmed Smith’s theory of the case. It turned out that there was, in fact, a third path for the novel (and many more besides, including Smith’s own career of hopping from genre to genre and giving voice to the polyglot identities of a globalized world). Autofiction would make McCarthy’s metafictional experiments seem remote and bloodless in comparison while turning the pillars of the realist novel — fictional characters, invented dialogue, and, above all, the Rube Goldberg machine of plot — into fusty contrivances. (As Lauren Oyler, a devotee of autofiction, has said, “I find the concept of plot oppressive.”)
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 has recently become a commentator on American politics, writing columns on the subject for the New York Review of Books and tweeting constantly about what “the Dems” must do to beat Donald Trump this November. His first novel in 10 years, Godwin, is 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 — why it is still the undefeated champ of the literary arts, no matter how many challengers come and go — which makes its flaws intriguing because they suggest a way for the realist novel to become unstuck.
Netherland’s Hans van den Brock is a successful futures trader whose marriage is falling apart; Godwin’s Mark Wolfe is his inverse: a happily married father whose career is going nowhere. He is a technical writer who spends his days drafting grants, medical literature, installation manuals, reference guides, and so on. When we first meet him, he is a bit like Moby-Dick’s Ishmael: grim about the mouth, a damp, drizzly November in his soul. “Wolfe’s occupation, his earnings, maybe did not accord with his sense of being successful,” says Lakesha Williams, a Black woman (her identity is significant) who leads Wolfe’s technical-writing cooperative and opens the story as the book’s narrator. When we switch to Mark’s point of view, Lakesha’s insight is confirmed: As one gets older, he says, “one becomes, if anything, more desperate for success — for a sign that one’s life has not been lived in vain.”
Wolfe’s discontent bubbles over in various ways: flipping the bird at a security guard, finding himself disgusted by a woman licking ice cream. “My only cause for disgust, need it be said, was my own blackheartedness,” he says. His ennui also springs from the normal midlife pangs, and the world and its stupidity — “stupidity that’s purposeful and communicable and strangely greedy” — is vaguely to blame, too. The year is 2015. We know where the world’s stupidity will lead us.
If all this makes Wolfe sound like a disagreeable presence, nothing could be further from the truth. He is a wonderful character, or at least one to whom many men of similar age and disposition can no doubt relate. Guys who feel they are owed more success tend to have a rather high, if unearned, opinion of themselves, and the book is at its best when Wolfe looks back on the arrogant young man he once was, convinced that he and his college buddies were going to make a scientific breakthrough and rule the planet. “Nothing more than worthless intellectual vagrancy or, to put it more brutally, lostness,” he says of that time. “All of this was done under the rubric of personal brilliance.” Every encounter with a person possessing “that mild psychopathy of youth” is an occasion for tragic hilarity: “The men, especially, view me with an expression at once merciless and pitying. No way, they figure, will they end up like me, grinding out grant applications for the medical-pharmacological complex.”
Middle age is an occasion to atone for his misbegotten youth, but Mark is too conceited to strive for success in ordinary, grubby ways. “My unspoken fantasy was that I was a furtive ideological hero and that one day I’d come out of hiding and my scorn for riches and recognition would pay off — in recognition and riches, of course.” So when he gets a distress call from his younger half-brother, Geoff — an aspiring soccer agent in England who believes he has discovered an unknown footballing virtuoso named Godwin and needs Mark’s help in locating him — it appears the kind of conspicuous success he craves may have landed in his lap. Perhaps even tremendous success, given the lucrative sums professional players can garner in the overheated soccer market. His apparent salvation, like Ishmael’s, lies in embarking on a journey into the unknown.
Geoff, a shady white guy who speaks a comically awful London-Jamaican dialect in which every other sentence ends with “fam” or “blud” or “bruv,” has injured his leg and is on crutches and so needs Mark to do him “a solid.” Mark’s mission: Travel to France to show a video of Godwin, obtained on the black market, to a soccer scout named Jean-Luc Lefebvre, who will be able to confirm Godwin’s identity. Lefebvre is a drunken, chain-smoking sage who waxes philosophical about the beautiful game. The silent video of a skinny dark-skinned boy appears to reveal a singular player gliding through packs of mere mortals with the ball glued to his feet. He possesses all the attributes of the savant: “acceleration, touch, match awareness, courage.” With Mark’s assistance they are able to locate Godwin in Benin. Mark and Lefebvre are ready to fly to Cotonou and retrieve him.
Here, I regret to say, is where what has been a terrific novel so far goes completely off the rails, culminating in one of the most absurd endings I’ve read in some time. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that Mark does not go to Benin. He goes back to Pittsburgh, where Lakesha picks up the story; she, along with Mark, becomes embroiled in a painfully dull drama at their technical-writing cooperative. Lefebvre does travel to Benin and reappears later in Pittsburgh to recount what happened there. But the narrative we were seemingly promised has been denied us. O’Neill even gives us a vision of what might have been: “We will make a perfectly odd couple of travelers — the wily, grumpy old Gaul and the Yank rookie. I can easily picture us squabbling over the window seat on the plane to Cotonou, poring over road maps in the bar of a hotel, him riding shotgun as I drive a jeep through the bush, the whole thing underwritten by a comic buddy vibe.” I would have read the hell out of that book. Why didn’t O’Neill write it? Call it the anxiety of realism.
O’Neill made his name with Netherland partly because it was a smarter sort of realism, nervously aware that realism’s claims to authenticity are dubious. His narrator, Hans, an investor who pays exorbitant sums to live in the famed Chelsea Hotel, doesn’t really represent the overwhelming majority of mankind, so O’Neill’s attempts to claim some universal experience are thus made not via identity but language. The world of Netherland “is covered in language,” Smith writes with exasperation, viewing O’Neill’s facility with simile and rhythm as a crutch to get at some semblance of the truth.
This tendency is evident in Godwin, too. As Mark begins his journey to Europe with a nighttime bus ride to the airport, the Poconos Mountains seen dimly through the window resemble “immense geological ghouls,” and suddenly he realizes he is not at the center of the cosmos: “A sense of personal insignificance and doom is inevitable. This is the drawback of vigilance: from your watchtower you finally spy, in your binoculars, your fleeing self; and you release the hounds.” Then, he adds, “I speak for myself, of course, on the basis of my experiences and hunches, which is to say, my misconceptions and my stupid fears.” This is the O’Neillian two-step: an elegantly written gesture at the notion that the self is an inadequate vessel for conveying reality, then a whole novel that uses the self to do that anyway.
Consider the anxiety that arises from sending two white guys to deepest, darkest Africa to find a boy who will be sold in a literal marketplace. O’Neill has a major problem. He is not only flirting with cliché (westerners have zany adventures in foreign land) but has to depict a poverty-stricken nation through two characters who are not exactly the best equipped to understand it. So instead he flies Mark back to America and later has Lefebvre regale him with tales of Benin that are supposed to shock and horrify with their lack of sensitivity. “What a loathsome, vicious, unacceptable description!” Mark cries, referring to Lefebvre’s sketch of limbless beggars. Putting this part of the story in the mouth of an inebriated Frenchman seems nothing less than a crisis of confidence in the realist mode to depict anything at all.
At the same time, O’Neill asserts that the novelist can transcend identity in other ways by imagining himself into the mind of a Black woman. This reads to me as a defense of the novelist’s ability to cross lines of race and gender to step into other people’s shoes, an argument that has been made with less sophistication and more angst in recent years by culture-warrior gadflies like Lionel Shriver. But the problem is not really one of appropriation; it’s that these attempts almost always feel inauthentic, and that’s precisely how O’Neill fails here. Perhaps in an attempt to steer Lakesha clear of stereotype, she is made into a dutiful manager who just wants to run her company in peace, and the result is a dreadfully boring character who doesn’t have the same depth of interiority as Mark. (Also, Lakesha? Really?)
As it happens, Mark himself might be the most inauthentic character of all: a supposed “Yank” who, thanks to his formal and somewhat old-fashioned English, doesn’t sound like a Yank in the slightest. In fact, Americans don’t usually refer to themselves as Yanks, but cosmopolitans who have lived all over the world (people like, say, O’Neill) sometimes do.
Given all the pitfalls the realist novel faces, is it any wonder that writers have abandoned it in droves for autofiction? If art is supposed to be “the nearest thing we have to life,” as George Eliot, the realist par excellence, once said, then why would artists labor in a form that feels so at odds with it? Autofiction has ontological issues of its own, but by radically narrowing the aperture of the novelist’s viewpoint to the peepholes in his head and what he harbors in his humble heart, it has at least successfully imitated what reality feels like for pretty much everyone.
Autofiction has also resolved the paradox that has long bedeviled realism: that it can represent reality using artifice, that it can tell the truth with lies. Knausgård, in particular, cut through this Gordian knot with a stroke so simple that it might well be genius, namely to run as far away as possible from artifice — to not only write of “real” experiences and “real” people but to leave behind beauty and poetry and other attributes we associate with fine writing; to write badly, basically. (“It’s easy to marshal examples of what makes My Struggle mediocre,” Ben Lerner, also a practitioner of autofiction, has written. “The problem is: it’s amazing.”) This is at least one response to those who allegedly use lovely language as a substitute for genuine expression.
The realists might take a page from the autofictionalists, who apologize for nothing and embrace their limits so tightly that it liberates them to write about everything. I would have preferred O’Neill to be less anxious, to send the boys to Benin and deal with the complications as best as one can. There is a fine line between self-consciousness and self-doubt, and it is all too easy to fall into the latter. But that doesn’t mean the realists have to abandon the more unnatural devices of their craft to be authentic. For a time, Mark and Geoff and Lefebvre, as ridiculous as they sometimes are, were as real to me as Dorothea Brooke and Casaubon, evidence that we will never really tire of made-up people doing made-up stuff for made-up reasons. Nor will we tire of lyricism if it is the right vehicle for a thought or a feeling. At one point, Mark describes tucking in his daughter to sleep: “Her bed is a warm little boat. Beyond its borders is the dark sea.” Is this realism? Or a bit of autofiction smuggled in? It doesn’t really matter because it feels true.
