Category / Mitchell, David

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show #54: David Mitchell II, Part One

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[NOTE: This is part one of a two-part podcast.]

Author: David Mitchell

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Responding to the crazed accusations of a major film director.

Subjects Discussed: The similarities between Jason Taylor and David Mitchell, idiosynchratic vernacular, first-person vs. third-person voice, index cards, how Granta unexpectedly kicked off Black Swan Green, the correct pronounciation of Nabokov, the difference between sandwiches in the US and the UK, the use of 1980s technology in writing, the Falkland Islands, on selecting cultural references from 1982, Friendster, the regulation of UK schools over the past thirty years, the use of visual elements in BSG, authenticity, money and Thatcher’s England, MacGuffins in novels and life, being nice to horrid people, the Julia principle, the politics of language, hip-hop culture, the threat of conformity vs. Jason Taylor’s resilience, shaking off the Murakami yoke, the Ed Park review, on using characters from other books, and naming the headmaster Nixon, and character names that “stick on the eyeball.”

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by Edward Champion

Birnbaum vs. Mitchell

Robert Birnbaum talks with David Mitchell and it looks like he may have discovered Amoeba when he came through San Francisco: “There is a wonderful music store in San Francisco, vast warehouses like Borgesian universes of CDs—I forget the name.”

[UPDATE: Jenny D quibbles with Mitchell’s assertion that “all novels are actually compounded short stories” and goes on to suggest that Mitchell’s humor is a bit lacking. I agree with Jenny on the first point, but I think Mitchell was attempting to aver his own influences. Certainly, every single one of Mitchell’s novels represents an interconnected series of stories and perhaps this narrative approach is how he views fiction. As for Mitchell having no sense of humor, I will eventually offer first-hand evidence that he does indeed have a sense of humor, particularly regarding oddly formed sentences involving sandwiches. Stay tuned. The podcast is up the pipeline.]

by Edward Champion

Contrarian for Contrarian’s Sake

Paul Constant, writing in The Stranger, serves up a contrarian review of Black Swan Green: “Black Swan Green could prove to be Mitchell’s most acclaimed novel yet, although it’s clearly his worst. There is almost nothing exceptional left to be written about children. It’s all been said before….”

Really? So I guess anyone writing about kids should just throw in the towel then. Because children, just like adults, have no complexity whatsoever. Children are mere amoebas, easily programmable and readable by the adult units, often skirting the edge of the ocean floor.

Constant complains that one of Jason’s sentiments about the Falkland Islands “rings false,” but never explains exactly why. He complains that cultural references get “name-checked,” as if Mitchell has written an encyclopedia book instead of a novel. But if one is writing about an adolescent in the early 1980s, does not a reference to one of the hottest video games of that era (Space Invaders) make sense?

I’m all for contrarian criticism. Even though I’m a Mitchell fan, I actually think Black Swan Green has been just a tad overpraised myself. But if unsubstantiated bile like this is the order of the day, how then can an array of variegated opinions be established?