Delighted and Devastated by David Mitchell

A few years ago, I was browsing the shelves at a clearance sale in a bookstore. All prices were heavily discounted as the store was going out of business, so instead of going in with a clear idea of what I wanted to buy, I was doing much more meandering than usual. A book called Black Swan Green caught my eye - probably because of the strange title - and I picked it up when I saw that the accolades of both book and author (Booker Prize finalist, best seller, best book for young adults, etc.) I added it to my Buy pile. I generally do meticulous research before selecting a book to read - life is short and chunks of it should not be dedicated to reading bad fiction - so I come across few books in this random way. But looking back, it feels like providence, because Black Swan Green was my introduction to the truly monumental talent of David Mitchell.

This seemed a fitting picture

I should, nay will, do a Legit Lit post about Black Swan Green, as well as The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, the other Mitchell book I've read, but for now I will wrench myself away from my urge to gush about his spellbinding skill and describe, instead, the experience of seeing him speak last night at Symphony Space. The event was one of the Selected Shorts series in which a lauded author selects short stories written by other authors and explains why they are fantastic, then steps back to let an actor read them to the audience. First, however, John Freeman, the editor of a magazine called Granta about new writing - which I must investigate - introduced Mitchell. He was an awkward speaker, and his poor phrasing took away from the loveliness of his words, unfortunately. Then Mitchell took over the podium and the atmosphere shifted from squirmy to glowing within a few sentences. He was tall and very thin with short-cropped hair, and wore a green t-shirt, a too-big blazer, and jeans. After thanking everyone at Symphony Space and declaring that his head would be large enough to exceed the baggage restrictions on his flight back to London after Freeman's introduction, he held out a few papers and sort of squinted at them, reading verbatim that he was supposed to discuss some of his favorite authors in 2 to 3 minutes. He expressed his relief, stating that it's much easier to talk about authors than to introduce one's self (and that stuff is all on Wikipedia anyway), then launched into a rhapsodic adulation of Anton Chekov, Tolkein, Isaac Asimov, and Mikhail Bulgakov. He practically knocked over the podium in his enthusiastic promotion of Independent People, by Halldor Laxness. Then he recounted reading Ursula Le Guin as a boy (he still finds her to be sublime) and being filled with the desire to write because "you want to do to others what's just been done to you," to write a book so captivating that "the room vanishes."

If you've read any of Mitchell's work, and I can't recommend strongly enough that you do, you'll know instantly that here is a man who has a nearly unprecedented way with words. However, he seemed to be struggling sometimes to find the right word, and this hesitancy was compounded by the unbridled joy evident in his voice and gestures as he talked about writing he loved. I had a hunch that this wordsmith couldn't possibly be searching for the right word - his overall eloquence was too great for that - and I recalled that the protagonist in Black Swan Green has a stutter. A bit of research today confirmed my suspicions that Mitchell himself suffered from a stutter as a child. I don't think the casual observer would have made the connection, though; if his difficulties with speech were as bad as Jason's, he's come so far that he comes off as someone lovably bumbling instead of a sufferer of a speech impediment.

For his short stories, Mitchell selected "Vanilla Bright Like Eminem" by Michel Faber and "The Burning Palms" by Claire Keegan, and both were brought spectacularly to life by actors Daniel Gerroll and Patricia Kalember. Mitchell read his notes from a black Moleskine notebook. When he described Keegan's writing, he seemed hardly able to contain his admiration for the way she put words together to convey meaning far deeper than their individual definitions. He read us a short sentence from the first part of the story, then twittered, "She packs so much into this little suitcase [meaning the sentence] and then, blaugh [estimation of spelling; word accompanied by exploding gesture made by hands], it just...spills meaning and implications and resonances..." He followed this with a happy sigh.  Then, of another sentence, "'...rain dripping on the rhubarb leaves.' You can just hear the drops in that sentence, can't you?" He tapped the microphone with a finger several times, murmuring dreamily,"drip, drip, drip." If Mitchell wasn't an author, he should be teaching poetry to sullen youths, as there's absolutely no chance of their being able to remain less than enchanted by the art of the written word after three minutes with this man.

After hearing the short stories, we were treated to a discussion between Mitchell and Freeman. We learned that Mitchell writes a long, thorough biography for every one of his characters before beginning a novel, which explains why his characters are so astoundingly three-dimensional and also why it takes him three or four years to write each book. He said that events from their lives often work their way into his books, though he's never had one of these biographies turn into its own book. Freeman commended Mitchell for the breadth of time periods, settings, and genres covered by his books. When asked about his vision of the movie version of Cloud Atlas as compared with the book he wrote by the same title, he laughed that he was really glad the director had re-imagined so much of it because a film made to follow his book exactly "would suck." The movie comes out in just a few days. We watched the trailer, and then one last actor (wonderful Campbell Scott) read a chapter from the book that took the form of a letter written by an irreverent  witty, gay composer in the 1930's whom I'm devastated I'll never meet. It was, he was mind-blowing. I must read this book immediately.

I've written a lot about being delighted by David Mitchell. Now for the devastation in the title of this post: because he flew back to the UK immediately after the talk, he did not do a book signing. I was crushed, and ordered something very unhealthy at the diner we went to afterward, hoping smother my pain in french fries and American cheese while Ed tried very hard to make cheerful conversation, even offering to sign my books for me while feigning a charming, bumbling British accent.

So David Mitchell, if you stumble across this post some day, reach out. Let's make a deal in which I get one of your signed books and you can have...my firstborn? It would be a fair trade to own a book signed by a writer with as titanic a talent as yours.