Clickbait title, I know, but please bear with me. I think I'm onto something; call it— An Essay on Fiction and Reality, Eternity and Time In the mid-1970s, Hugh Kenner wrote an essay on William Faulkner entitled "The Last Novelist" (you can find it both in Kenner's book on American modernism, A Homemade World, where it forms … Continue reading Is David Mitchell the William Faulkner of the Twenty-First Century?
Tag: david mitchell
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell My rating: 2 of 5 stars It was about a decade ago that John Banville rightly called Ian McEwan's Saturday "a dismayingly bad book," and I am sorry to say that I would make the same judgment about this new novel by another maven of mainstream British fiction. I … Continue reading David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
While I enjoyed number9dream, Cloud Atlas, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, I haven't read David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, and I don't know that I will. The high fantasy trope of immemorially-warring clans who represent good and evil may secretly structure most political commentary today, but the peculiar virtue of literature is … Continue reading James Wood, David Mitchell, and the Metaphysics and Morality of the Novel
