He’s Obsessed With Sports and Politics. His Novels Are, Too.

The novelist Joseph O’Neill has a good idea of his daughter’s earliest memories: being driven through the northern swath of Benin in a jeep, in hot pursuit of a (fictional) story her father himself was only beginning to understand. This is remote terrain, even for visitors who aren’t American toddlers on their first trip to West Africa.

This was in 2015, part of an essential literary reconnaissance mission for O’Neill, who was at work on a sprawling tale of an adrift but brilliant man, an athletic prodigy and the fallibility of human consensus.

O’Neill is accustomed to working on a large canvas, writing books that crisscross the world and follow intelligent, sensitive, occasionally self-lacerating men in exile.

The resulting novel, “Godwin,” which Pantheon will publish on Tuesday, centers on Mark Wolfe, a roguish and capable (if underperforming) technical writer in Pittsburgh who belongs to a writing cooperative and appears to be suffering a “crisis of dignity.” When his half brother, an aspiring soccer talent scout in England, calls with an enigmatic prospect — the promise of signing Africa’s answer to Lionel Messi — Mark embarks on an adventure that will change the course of his life.

Braided in with Mark’s plight is a workplace drama, full of bureaucratic back-stabbing and passive-aggressive emails of a sort that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever attended a city council meeting or watched public access TV. The stakes of both stories — a one-in-a-million shot at celebrity for a young athlete, the elusive promise of professional harmony — are equally high, and ratchet up as the plotlines inevitably dovetail by the novel’s end.