You may be shocked to hear this, but I didn’t do a lot of reading over the three-day weekend. Book #4 was David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green. I’ll withhold my opinion until I get a chance to take this up with Megan. Needless to say, my reaction is extremely complicated and requires a good deal of thought. I read this book very slowly for a reason. I’ll only say that I think this novel was definitely the right step forward for Mitchell. But it’s an ambitious attempt that’s definitely going to split readers. I think we’re going to see the same heated and divisive reactions that we saw with Ian McEwan’s Saturday. More to follow.
75 Books, Book #4
– January 17, 2006Posted in: 75 Books, Mitchell, David, Uncategorized
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
I’ve just read Black Swan Green myself – my reaction is here – and agree that it is ambitious, and also feel that it establishes literary skills that haven’t necessarily been evident in the style of fiction he’s chosen to write before this, notably a sustained narrative voice. But I do wonder whether you are right that it will split readers. Anyone expecting another Cloud Atlas will probably be disappointed, but I’m not convinced that many people would be reading him in the expectation that he would repeat himself. Surely the split over Saturday was largely political rather than literary, and I don’t think the political content of Black Swan Green, over the Falklands War for instance, would have the same response because it is so clearly filtered through the 13-year-old perspective of the narrator. (Mind you, I saw the political content of Saturday as McEwan’s way of showing us into the mind of Perowne, but many readers seemed to take it straight.)