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A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell by O'Donnell, Patrick (2015) Paperback
David Mitchell has emerged as one of the leading figures of the current “under-50” generation of contemporary British writers and is rapidly taking his place amongst British novelists with the gravitas of an Ishiguro or a McEwan. Written for a wide constituency of scholars, students, and readers of contemporary literature, A Temporary The Fiction of David Mitchell explores Mitchell’s primary concerns—including those of identity, history, language, imperialism, childhood, the environment, ethnicity—across the five novels published thus far, as well as his protean ability to write in multiple and diverse genres. It places Mitchell in the tradition of Murakami, Sebald, Ishiguro, and Rushdie—writers whose work explore narrative in an age of globalization and cosmopolitanism. O’Donnell traces the through-lines of Mitchell’s work from Ghostwritten to The Thousand Autumns and, with a chapter on each of the five novels, tracks the evolution of Mitchell’s fictional project. The concluding chapter addresses Mitchell as a writer of the future.
- GenresNonfiction
Paperback
First published November 13, 2014
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About the author
Patrick O'Donnell
56 books28 followersPatrick O’Donnell is the product of two young Irish immigrants. He was born and spent his early childhood in the great city of Chicago.
He lives with his wife, kids, and 3 dogs. O’Donnell has published self-help books under different pen names and made Amazon’s “Best Sellers List.” Hobbies include physical fitness, travel, riding motorcycles, and shenanigans.
He lives with his wife, kids, and 3 dogs. O’Donnell has published self-help books under different pen names and made Amazon’s “Best Sellers List.” Hobbies include physical fitness, travel, riding motorcycles, and shenanigans.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 9, 2017
There’s something about David Mitchell’s novels that seems opposed to scholarship. His working methods act as a rebuke to the sort of high-literary philosophizers like Harold Bloom and David Cowart. On first glance, his nuanced characters and ultra-complex structures seem like the stuff of postmodern dreams. But then there’s all those psychic battles and disconnected spirits, and they’re not, like, symbols or hallucinations. They’re really spirits, and the psychic battles are really happening, in the same timeline where young would-be poets with stammers try to negotiate life in the social hierarchy of primary school. Mitchell’s got lofty aspirations for his books, but he wants everything in there, the detective stories and video game iconography and unapologetic superhero breakouts, not because they critique our shallow, media-obsessed culture, but because they’re fun to read, and because mixing high and low genres all together is fun, too. There’s a lot of moving parts to fiddle with if you want to, but Mitchell’s stories rarely get so dense that slogging through them feels like hunting for Buddhist iconography in “The Waste Land” because your English Lit teacher assures you it’s there.
I felt like I was pretty well versed in David Mitchell’s uber-universe, that web of recurring characters (and descendants of characters) and historical events that pop up from novel to novel, but O’Donnell dug out a bunch of little connections that I didn’t notice on my first readings. Each time I finish a David Mitchell novel, my first impulse is to re-read another one, usually the one I read the longest ago. I’m long overdue for a re-read of Cloud Atlas, and I’m sure once I re-read that, I’ll want another shot at ghostwritten or The Bone Clocks. Like Tarkovsky’s films, immersion into Mitchell’s art feels like a closed circuit, where each new experience just makes you want to circle back and enjoy one of his others again, and each re-read deepens connections that seemed hazy at first, but clearly charts a much longer narrative pathway from book to book.
So maybe a scholarly book about his novels isn’t such a bad idea after all!
O’Donnell’s introduction is a bit arch, but was helpful to me in its description of Mitchell as an anthropological novelist, “a writer who presents individual psychology and current society through the long and wide lenses of cultural systems.” He also suggests comparisons to Dickens (in the way that characters of different social layers and strata bump up against one another) and stories as interconnected islands or overlapping layers, the way information from one novel is self-contained but connects with another story-island through a thin strand, be it a geographical event or a recurring character. These are the sorts of things you might idly think about while reading Mitchell’s books, but O’Donnell makes them more explicit while also tying it to other postmodernists and post-postmodernists of the literary canon.
Each of O’Donnell’s chapters focuses on one book, but also focuses it through one concept. For ghostwritten, it’s the interconnection of characters. This is by far the most complex chapter, and O’Donnell clearly has the most love for this book, as he dotes on his capsule reviews of each chapter and all of the ways they connect to previous chapters. You’ll be surprised how many tiny interconnections you may have missed!
The chapter for Number9Dream concerns the novel-as-city, with Eiji Miyake and his associates acting as stimulants and reactants to the main character, namely the city of Tokyo. This is my seventh-favorite Mitchell book (out of seven), so this chapter needed to build the longest bridge to me to get me on board. Ultimately, O’Donnell’s analysis, given over to allusions of video game iconography (The way Eiji has “Save Point” locations, such as his apartment or the pizza place, where he returns from his boss-battle confrontation to rest and regroup) and meta-textuality told me what I already knew – there’s a lot of stuff in this book, but it seems to be mostly surface and location.
Cloud Atlas’s chapter connects it to ghostwritten, using the latter’s interconnections while deepening them by connecting them vertically, through long time periods. O’Donnell chooses to focus on each narrative point as a place in which history makes a change for the better. I feel that way too, but the unstoppable tidal wave of disappointments and irrevocable failure are also an important part of the narrative. At any given time, unfathomable evil and principled good are happening at the same time, not always in equal balance. More interesting, though, is the way O’Donnell deals with the interconnected characters and timelines as a deliberate, partial read of history, a history as told to these interconnected few. As such, the “past” that Somni~451 sees is only a version of the past, a film created by Timothy Cavendish for the specific aim of self-aggrandizement. Even though we see human history at all these points, we see it only from the perspective of the storytellers, and we only see those perspectives because these people are somehow connected, perhaps in ways that future books will reveal. (There’s also a nice coda that discusses the other intents revealed in the film version.)
For Black Swan Green, O’Donnell concentrates on something I’d barely noticed about the book, namely the cascade of pop culture references, TV program titles, movie titles, songs, candies, household product names, etc. He frames Jason Taylor, poet-in-training, as someone who finds his way in the world by cataloging it. His journey as an artist lies not only in traversing the difficulties of human emotion, but also the minefields of cultural production. It’s an interesting theory, but it’s not one I put a lot of stock on. To me, the book, like all of Mitchell’s books, is a war of resources. Love is a dwindling resource when your parents are divorcing and girls are scary and your stammer means you get called uncool nicknames at school, but so is social capital. So is the resource of time. Time with a mentor. Time with a sister that can help explain things. Time with a father that promises to take you out on your birthday, but has to work late. The Falkland Islands are a resource, but so is membership in an elite club that you can only join by engaging in a high-speed run through the neighbors’ backyards. Apart from his broken watch, the things Jason Taylor wants are all precious resources, all in limited supply, all seemingly hoarded by everyone else in the world against him.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, not surprisingly, is noted as taking place on an artificial island off the coast of Japan, tying it to the other books, which act as “a collocation of lost worlds, receding temporalities, and spatial dislocations that collide and overlap, where the fault lines of encounter, accident, missed opportunity, and fatal consequence reveal patterns that form the narrative matrix of a reconstructed ‘History.’” Like Cloud Atlas, O’Donnell sees in Mitchell’s historical novel a minor history that connects to other, larger historical accounts, and is itself a large island that appears one way when read as a self-contained book, but becomes another story entirely when read against his next novel. Concepts of translation between languages (Japanese and Dutch) and errors in translation also permeate this book, a further alienation between cultures that leads to more strife and suffering. O’Donnell elegant compares the Japanese game of Go to Mitchell’s view on the rise and fall of nations, the way fortunes and widespread suffering can rest on small, unexpected gestures, a concept that goes all the way back to ghostwritten.
Let’s face it: The Bone Clocks has a lot of plot. O’Donnell spends the bulk of the chapter simply recapping what the book is about, interconnecting the threads from previous books into this, painting it as a “near-future” stopgap that connects present day with Cloud Atlas and its far future, while also making much of the behind-the-scenes war that apparently permeates all of these books. Overall insights in this chapter were low, though I definitely saw a few connections that weren’t apparent in my own reading. (Also, it seems the author had access to an advance reader copy, as he too mentions Luisa Rey and Tim Cavendish as characters, even though both were expunged from the final version of the book!)
Ultimately, I read this because it’s a thing to read, and I love Mitchell enough to want to read it all. If your enjoyment of Mitchell’s crazy worlds is enough on its own, there’s nothing to be lost by just leaving it that way – Mitchell isn’t Pynchon or Gaddis or Joyce, where a deep analysis of symbols or allusions is crucial to even the most basic enjoyment of the work. O’Donnell’s book-length analysis is fun to read and reveals a few filament-thin plotlines that weren’t immediately obvious to me, but his interpretation is no more or less accurate than the opinion of any Mitchell fanatic who has gobbled all these books up and spent some idle hours thinking about what they all mean.
I felt like I was pretty well versed in David Mitchell’s uber-universe, that web of recurring characters (and descendants of characters) and historical events that pop up from novel to novel, but O’Donnell dug out a bunch of little connections that I didn’t notice on my first readings. Each time I finish a David Mitchell novel, my first impulse is to re-read another one, usually the one I read the longest ago. I’m long overdue for a re-read of Cloud Atlas, and I’m sure once I re-read that, I’ll want another shot at ghostwritten or The Bone Clocks. Like Tarkovsky’s films, immersion into Mitchell’s art feels like a closed circuit, where each new experience just makes you want to circle back and enjoy one of his others again, and each re-read deepens connections that seemed hazy at first, but clearly charts a much longer narrative pathway from book to book.
So maybe a scholarly book about his novels isn’t such a bad idea after all!
O’Donnell’s introduction is a bit arch, but was helpful to me in its description of Mitchell as an anthropological novelist, “a writer who presents individual psychology and current society through the long and wide lenses of cultural systems.” He also suggests comparisons to Dickens (in the way that characters of different social layers and strata bump up against one another) and stories as interconnected islands or overlapping layers, the way information from one novel is self-contained but connects with another story-island through a thin strand, be it a geographical event or a recurring character. These are the sorts of things you might idly think about while reading Mitchell’s books, but O’Donnell makes them more explicit while also tying it to other postmodernists and post-postmodernists of the literary canon.
Each of O’Donnell’s chapters focuses on one book, but also focuses it through one concept. For ghostwritten, it’s the interconnection of characters. This is by far the most complex chapter, and O’Donnell clearly has the most love for this book, as he dotes on his capsule reviews of each chapter and all of the ways they connect to previous chapters. You’ll be surprised how many tiny interconnections you may have missed!
The chapter for Number9Dream concerns the novel-as-city, with Eiji Miyake and his associates acting as stimulants and reactants to the main character, namely the city of Tokyo. This is my seventh-favorite Mitchell book (out of seven), so this chapter needed to build the longest bridge to me to get me on board. Ultimately, O’Donnell’s analysis, given over to allusions of video game iconography (The way Eiji has “Save Point” locations, such as his apartment or the pizza place, where he returns from his boss-battle confrontation to rest and regroup) and meta-textuality told me what I already knew – there’s a lot of stuff in this book, but it seems to be mostly surface and location.
Cloud Atlas’s chapter connects it to ghostwritten, using the latter’s interconnections while deepening them by connecting them vertically, through long time periods. O’Donnell chooses to focus on each narrative point as a place in which history makes a change for the better. I feel that way too, but the unstoppable tidal wave of disappointments and irrevocable failure are also an important part of the narrative. At any given time, unfathomable evil and principled good are happening at the same time, not always in equal balance. More interesting, though, is the way O’Donnell deals with the interconnected characters and timelines as a deliberate, partial read of history, a history as told to these interconnected few. As such, the “past” that Somni~451 sees is only a version of the past, a film created by Timothy Cavendish for the specific aim of self-aggrandizement. Even though we see human history at all these points, we see it only from the perspective of the storytellers, and we only see those perspectives because these people are somehow connected, perhaps in ways that future books will reveal. (There’s also a nice coda that discusses the other intents revealed in the film version.)
For Black Swan Green, O’Donnell concentrates on something I’d barely noticed about the book, namely the cascade of pop culture references, TV program titles, movie titles, songs, candies, household product names, etc. He frames Jason Taylor, poet-in-training, as someone who finds his way in the world by cataloging it. His journey as an artist lies not only in traversing the difficulties of human emotion, but also the minefields of cultural production. It’s an interesting theory, but it’s not one I put a lot of stock on. To me, the book, like all of Mitchell’s books, is a war of resources. Love is a dwindling resource when your parents are divorcing and girls are scary and your stammer means you get called uncool nicknames at school, but so is social capital. So is the resource of time. Time with a mentor. Time with a sister that can help explain things. Time with a father that promises to take you out on your birthday, but has to work late. The Falkland Islands are a resource, but so is membership in an elite club that you can only join by engaging in a high-speed run through the neighbors’ backyards. Apart from his broken watch, the things Jason Taylor wants are all precious resources, all in limited supply, all seemingly hoarded by everyone else in the world against him.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, not surprisingly, is noted as taking place on an artificial island off the coast of Japan, tying it to the other books, which act as “a collocation of lost worlds, receding temporalities, and spatial dislocations that collide and overlap, where the fault lines of encounter, accident, missed opportunity, and fatal consequence reveal patterns that form the narrative matrix of a reconstructed ‘History.’” Like Cloud Atlas, O’Donnell sees in Mitchell’s historical novel a minor history that connects to other, larger historical accounts, and is itself a large island that appears one way when read as a self-contained book, but becomes another story entirely when read against his next novel. Concepts of translation between languages (Japanese and Dutch) and errors in translation also permeate this book, a further alienation between cultures that leads to more strife and suffering. O’Donnell elegant compares the Japanese game of Go to Mitchell’s view on the rise and fall of nations, the way fortunes and widespread suffering can rest on small, unexpected gestures, a concept that goes all the way back to ghostwritten.
Let’s face it: The Bone Clocks has a lot of plot. O’Donnell spends the bulk of the chapter simply recapping what the book is about, interconnecting the threads from previous books into this, painting it as a “near-future” stopgap that connects present day with Cloud Atlas and its far future, while also making much of the behind-the-scenes war that apparently permeates all of these books. Overall insights in this chapter were low, though I definitely saw a few connections that weren’t apparent in my own reading. (Also, it seems the author had access to an advance reader copy, as he too mentions Luisa Rey and Tim Cavendish as characters, even though both were expunged from the final version of the book!)
Ultimately, I read this because it’s a thing to read, and I love Mitchell enough to want to read it all. If your enjoyment of Mitchell’s crazy worlds is enough on its own, there’s nothing to be lost by just leaving it that way – Mitchell isn’t Pynchon or Gaddis or Joyce, where a deep analysis of symbols or allusions is crucial to even the most basic enjoyment of the work. O’Donnell’s book-length analysis is fun to read and reveals a few filament-thin plotlines that weren’t immediately obvious to me, but his interpretation is no more or less accurate than the opinion of any Mitchell fanatic who has gobbled all these books up and spent some idle hours thinking about what they all mean.
January 10, 2016
This was the second book of literary criticism of David Mitchell's work I've read, but unlike the first (David Mitchell: Critical Essays) it's the work of a single author. O'Donnell examines Mitchell's novels chronologically (starting with Ghostwritten and ending with The Bone Clocks), and examines how Mitchell plays with time within and across his novels. I really enjoyed O'Donnell's focus on the connection between the novels as well as how various authors (e.g., Calvino, Murakami) influenced Mitchell. Though the language is often dense due to the genre (literary criticism has its own jargon that is unintelligible to those outside its community) this book will be enjoyed by Mitchell fans.
After I read this I looked up O'Donnell and discovered that he is currently working on a book entitled: When Seen: Henry James Through Contemporary Film. As anyone who reads my reviews knows if there's any author I love at the David Mitchell level, it's Henry James. I can't wait for this, especially as I imagine an article O'Donnell has already published, Henry James's Memento, which examines James's The Beast in the Jungle and Christopher Nolan's film Memento, will be a chapter. Now if only I could convince him to write a book comparing and contrasting Henry James's novels with D.W. Griffith's films my life would be complete.
After I read this I looked up O'Donnell and discovered that he is currently working on a book entitled: When Seen: Henry James Through Contemporary Film. As anyone who reads my reviews knows if there's any author I love at the David Mitchell level, it's Henry James. I can't wait for this, especially as I imagine an article O'Donnell has already published, Henry James's Memento, which examines James's The Beast in the Jungle and Christopher Nolan's film Memento, will be a chapter. Now if only I could convince him to write a book comparing and contrasting Henry James's novels with D.W. Griffith's films my life would be complete.
June 22, 2017
After you get accustomed to the sometimes prolix academic language, this is a romp of an analysis of Mitchell's novels.
Three stars for that prolixity and some mighty sloppy editing.
Three stars for that prolixity and some mighty sloppy editing.
June 23, 2017
The book itself is an insightful look not only at Mitchell's collective works, but where they fall and how they are representative of multiple forms of psychology, sociology, lore, and history. The singular drawback was what seemed to be the author's attempt to impress the reader with the sheer size of his lexicon. (He does however, ease up as the book goes on) Overall, if you're a fan of Mitchell this one is worth a read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews