Pynchon comparison

Thu Feb 28 22:15:50 CST 2002

PW Daily for Booksellers February 28, 2002

PW Daily for Booksellers from Publishers Weekly
http://publishersweekly.reviewsnews.com

[...]

Far Out: David Mitchell's Dazzling Sophomore Outing, Number9Dream

Shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Award, Number9Dream (Random, $24.95) by
33-year old David Mitchell is a fantastic, beautifully written
coming-of-age story--and a rarity insofar as it may well exceed the
expectations of the contemporary novel after DeLillo and Pynchon.
Replete with dreams that are reality, realities that are reverie,
intercut narratives, stories-within-stories, a cat who repeatedly comes
back to life and enough deus ex machina to save a dozen lesser stories,
the book is an ambitious and brilliant opus.

Haunted by his twin sister's drowning and a mother mad with drink and
nerves, Eiji Miyake arrives in Tokyo in search of his father, a man
whose identity is apparently Brinks-protected and whose shadowy past is
attached to every hidden power center of Tokyo. Aided by his landlord, a
hacker deadset on cracking into the Pentagon, a musician with a
celestially perfect neck and the music of post-Beatles John Lennon, the
youthful Miyake pursues his father's shadow--and gets tossed about the
narrative like a buoy in a typhoon. He stumbles onto a
human-organ-smuggling ring operated by the Yakuza, loses his virginity
(or, rather, he forgets it) in a seedy sex motel, avenges the horrifying
past of a private detective, learns the fate of his great uncle, a WWII
kaiten torpedo pilot, falls in love ever so slowly and comes to accept
his disjointed place in a world composed of dreams.

Author Mitchell owes much to his literary predecessors. Reminiscent of
Ishmael Reed's The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Tim O'Brien's Going After
Cacciato and the detective novels of Haruki Murakami, he deftly combines
magical realism with postmodern silliness, existential absurdity with
high-modernist narrative pratfalls and ornate prose.

Unlike Reed's anything-goes satire and the fata morgana fates of
O'Brien's Paris-bound soldiers, what sets Number9Dream apart field is
Mitchell's ability to collapse the gap separating fiction from reality.
Realities are synchronous with other realities, dream logic pervades the
narrative logic, while meaning and insignificance share the same dance
floor. Plunging through the rapid-fire narrative and scrambling into the
novel's breathless conclusion, the hero Miyake is ever (dis)connected
from his world at-large.--Sean Peter Genell

[...]

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