Sheer storytelling brilliance. Mitchell really is his generation’s Pynchon.
Great Britain’s answer to Thomas Pynchon outdoes himself with this maddeningly intricate, improbably entertaining successor to Ghostwritten (2000) and Number9Dream (2002).
Mitchell’s latest consists of six narratives set in the historical and recent pasts and imagined futures, all interconnected whenever a later narrator encounters and absorbs the story that preceded his own. In the first, it’s 1850 and American lawyer-adventurer Adam Ewing is exploring endangered primitive Pacific cultures (specifically, the Chatham Islands’ native Moriori besieged by numerically superior Maori). In the second, “The Pacific Diary of Adam Ewing” falls (in 1931) into the hands of bisexual musician Robert Frobisher, who describes in letters to his collegiate lover Rufus Sixsmith his work as amanuensis to retired and blind Belgian composer Vivian Ayrs. Next, in 1975, sixtysomething Rufus is a nuclear scientist who opposes a powerful corporation’s cover-up of the existence of an unsafe nuclear reactor: a story investigated by crusading reporter Luisa Rey. The fourth story (set in the 1980s) is Luisa’s, told in a pulp potboiler submitted to vanity publisher Timothy Cavendish, who soon finds himself effectively imprisoned in a sinister old age home. Mitchell then moves to an indefinite future Korea, in which cloned “fabricants” serve as slaves to privileged “purebloods”—and fabricant Sonmi-451 enlists in a rebellion against her masters. The sixth story, told in its entirety before the novel doubles back and completes the preceding five (in reverse order), occurs in a farther future time, when Sonmi is a deity worshipped by peaceful “Valleymen”—one of whom, goatherd Zachry Bailey, relates the epic tale of his people’s war with their oppressors, the murderous Kona tribe. Each of the six stories invents a world, and virtually invents a language to describe it, none more stunningly than does Zachry’s narrative (“Sloosha’s Crossin’ and Ev’rythin’ After”). Thus, in one of the most imaginative and rewarding novels in recent memory, the author unforgettably explores issues of exploitation, tyranny, slavery, and genocide.
Sheer storytelling brilliance. Mitchell really is his generation’s Pynchon.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50725-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
SEEN & HEARD
Not exactly the first time this author has featured noble dogs, convenient ghosts, and plucky gals.
Another formula romance from ever-popular Michaels (What You Wish For, 2000, etc.), this time featuring a talk-show psychologist and the men who wronged her college chum.
Dr. Jane Lewis is lovely, self-assured, successful, and popular—the exact opposite of the plump, shy frump she used to be. Her radio call-in show boasts thousands of listeners, and she sees patients privately as well. One case particularly troubles her: a man who blames his wife for the rape that shattered their marriage. Jane can't help remembering her friend Connie Bryan, homecoming queen at Louisiana State and fiancée of the football team's star quarterback, Todd Prentice. Connie was waylaid and gang-raped by four unknown men (who spurned the unattractive Jane), then killed herself when Todd broke off their engagement. Connie had sworn her friend to secrecy, not even telling her own parents of the rape before she committed suicide. Jane is now determined to find out more, and she does so with the help of another psychologist, hunky Dr. Michael Sorenson, her erstwhile high-school crush. The pair host Jane's show together and rekindle their long-ago romance as she begins investigating the circumstances of Connie's rape and subsequent death. Jane also grapples with her mixed feelings about her own looks, reaching the departed spirit of her cold-hearted beauty-queen mother through a resident ghost. (Mom finally apologizes!) Michael and Jane eventually figure everything out, of course. Aided by a crack team of K-9 dogs, Jane corrals the likely suspects and reveals that she has kept Connie's semen-stained clothing in a bag for all these years, somehow knowing that DNA testing would incriminate someone eventually. The rapists get their just deserts—and Jane gets Michael.
Not exactly the first time this author has featured noble dogs, convenient ghosts, and plucky gals.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57566-673-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.
The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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