Coming of Age
Black Swan Green
David Mitchell
(Random House, 304 pgs, $23.95)
It's a testament to Mitchell's restraint that this never happens. The catastrophes and tribulations here are much more autobiographical and entirely the stuff of a typical 13-year old's nightmares: the burden of an embarrassing stammer, pending divorce, worrying about someone beating the shit out of you in the schoolyard. More importantly, the novel is grounded in its historical background: set during the Cold War in 1982 and, more specifically, in the midst of the Falklands-an imbroglio about as memorable for Americans as Reagan's adventure in Granada.
Critics have compared Mitchell to DeLillo, which is a gross category error, since the overrated Don would be so lucky to pen dialogue that cracks with such unrobotic humor. Black Swan Green, though, does borrow DeLillo's trick (and Rushdie's, and Gunter Grass', for that matter) of having human affairs serve as sweaty shorthand for global events. In this case, Jason's parents take the role of the two conflicting super powers butting heads in the heyday of communist paranoia, when school kids learned to crouch under desks to avoid being incinerated by nuclear explosions. And just as the Taylor clan mirrors the outside world, the marriage ends in confused and quasi-mutual defeat-divorce and a new young girlfriend for Jason's father, not the grim finality of a mushroom cloud.
In the wrong hands, Black Swan Green would be cloying and sentimental, pointless and trite. It is, essentially, a bildungsroman about a poetic young soul struggling to fit in among the brutes of Britain. Mitchell's familiar tropes of surreal violence and impossible synchronicity are conspicuously absent. Instead of a funhouse Japan, we get the bucolic rhythms of adolescent England; the novel's closest cousin is Bruce Robinson's The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman.
Whereas in books like Cloud Atlas he's shuffled through characters and settings like a manic attention-deficit, Black Swan Green is a very subdued, very British novel. Reading Mitchell's previous work is a sort of master class in the far reaches of creative excess, and his books have showcased every "I" (cult terrorists, frayed businessmen, teenagers of the post-apocalyptic tomorrow) except the real one. After the unmasking of James Frey and JT Leroy's disappearing act, it's refreshing to see that thinly veiled autobiography can be captivating, even without rampant crack addictions and truck-stop blowjobs. This novel is definitive proof that the author's talents can alchemize the mundane into the extraordinary, while showcasing something that, for Mitchell, is truly a radical departure-himself.