Ghostwritten
Last week I finished Ghostwritten1, David Mitchell's first novel. The book holds a unique structure as each of the nine chapters is narrated by a different person, each in a different part of the world. The jump off point is Okinawa, but Mitchell takes the reader west through Tokyo, Hong Kong, China's mainland, Mongolia, London, Russia, Ireland, and (of course) New York.
The theme most easily seen in the book is global connectedness. Sometimes it's paper thin like a phone call from Okinawa to a wrong number in Tokyo, other times it's deep and meaningful like the death of an old friend on a different continent. Mitchell weaves the reader in and out of places through telephone lines, history, chance, and design. There are other themes that Ghostwritten touches: the love of youth and that of age, the idea of writing ("ghostwriting") as reflection, and the future to which our deep connections could bind us. The book is very ambitious.
I like debut novels that are raw and this is probably what made me most attracted to Ghostwritten. In addition to its structure, Mitchell lets go and allows the stories room to maneuver. But this same raw, unrefined nature works against the book, almost destroying its virtues. Each chapter can be read as a short story and although this makes for an interesting approach, it also makes the book very uneven. I agree with many reviews that it made for shaky storytelling: one moment it's a "thriller", the next it's "sci fi." The voices of the characters were another device that may have been too ambitious - occasionally they were either too similar, unrealistic, or implausible.
In the end, however, the appeal of the book outweighed its weaknesses. Mitchell throws around a lot of clever references throughout the book. I've always enjoyed it when something I'm reading contains what I call "easter eggs," and Ghostwritten does not disappoint with subtle nods to jazz music, biblical passages, quantum mechanics, and history. Mitchell is a great story teller, and some chapters shine on their own. My favorite of the nine interlocking parts was the story of Satoru, a young man in Tokyo who works in a record store2. The part that I believe was best written was the story of a Chinese woman who maintained a tea shack on the pathway to a Buddhist shrine.
It's a good book with important themes. I look forward to picking it up again sometime in the future and getting even more out of it.
1You will find other reviews here and here.
2The whole chapter is excerpted here.
9:16:44 AM 
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