sign in sign up
<<
Home , Cloud Atlas (novel), David Mitchell (author), Ghostwritten (novel)

Palter & Prescience – On and Sean Hooks

SubStance, Volume 44, Number 1, 2015 (Issue 136), pp. 39-54 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2015.0005

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/577271

Access provided by University of Washington @ Seattle (2 Jun 2017 19:24 GMT) Sean Hooks c l i c k h e r e to a c c e s s t h e e n t i r e d av i d m i t c h e l l s p e c i a l i s s u e

Palter & Prescience – On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten Sean Hooks

The works of David Mitchell have inspired a consistent utilization of the lexicon of accolade, at times even of hyperbole. Reviews and criti- cal assessments are littered with terminology such as: visionary, protean, prolific, genre-bending jack-of-all-trades. He is, for some, the ultimate conceptual writer, a 21st Century Man. His work, until recently, was called unfilmable, and depending on your opinion of the Tykwer-Wachowski adaptation of , maybe you think it ought to have stayed that way. Maybe you’re a Mitchell fan who likes to tout the British maestro’s mash-ups of genre fiction and formalist literary mischief as redefining the novel, as mind-blowing, intuitive, challenging, pyrotechnic, ambitious, and clever. But one man’s clever is another woman’s gimmick, phrased as such because Mitchell’s books are populated by androgynes and float- ing consciousnesses, by liminal pubescents and dislodged expatriates, even by non-gendered (ungendered? genderless?) characters, phantasms and poltergeists, child ghosts and tribal gods and other undefinable sorts of immortal sentience. One who tends to write in the category of High Gamesmanship, David Mitchell is a cineaste audiophile lit-hound blender. Widely praised and well reviewed but also bestseller material, he is not a fringe member of some experimental fiction cabal, nor cogno- scenti fodder, nor a soi-disant enfant terrible. As much as his supporters might want to argue for his indie cred, he’s been blurbed by Dave Eggers and the movie version of his big novel starred . Mitchell is inarguably intelligent, seemingly sincere, even humble, despite aiming so high, aspiring to gargantuan meritorious blocks of impressiveness, an individual whose writing is highbrow and referential but who also possesses an affable accessibility. If Mitchell’s books are difficult they’re recognizably so, ‘fun difficult’ as opposed to ‘avant-garde difficult’ (for the latter, think Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, published the same year as Mitchell’s debut), and reading his first novel,Ghostwritten , fifteen years after its publication, what abides is its prescience. By presenting a Huxleyan dystopo-present freckled with brand names and macular with rampant consumerism – Mitchell would later dub the dystopo-future a ‘corpocracy’ in Cloud Atlas (in which Prescients become a race) – the globetrotting Englishman’s first book has been proven

© Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 39 40 Sean Hooks right about so many of its most pressing concerns. This is a novel with plenty of maximalist complexities and ‘big ideas’ – from a thread about transmigration to grapplings with the body-soul separation to allusions regaling you with erudition and aplomb on everything from Star Wars to The Master and Margarita, from Salman Rushdie to the history of jazz, from to cosmological and genetic facts – but his opening salvo is actually a much more straightforward one: he was a young novelist disappointed by the confounding inauthenticity of the modern world. Mitchell’s quasi-autobiographical was nominated by Slate’s Jessica Roake to replace The Catcher in the Rye as the coming- of-age novel of choice for the millennial generation and beyond (Roake). This is mostly because Salinger’s mid-20th century classic is viewed by some as didactic and privileged and other things that grad students and hipsters like to decry, but a Caulfieldian disdain for phonies is absolutely at the forefront of Mitchell’s debut as he weaves his Bridge of San Luis Rey-style causality brocade, a litany of disport rhetorically railing against the fake, the unreal, anything that’s less than capital ‘T’ True. Thornton Wilder’s novel is the source of this one’s epigraph and there’s also a central character in Ghostwritten known only as “the zookeeper,” called Zooey for short, Mitchell quite aware of J.D. Salinger’s oeuvre and legacy as well. Like the youngest and most put-upon member of the Glass family and his author, Mitchell yearns for integrity. He also aches to believe in an upside to the vexations of interconnectedness and privacy depredation that exist in a globalized real world and a post-DeLilloan fictive one (one of the few negative-leaning reviews of Ghostwritten upon initial publication came from Laura Miller in Salon who labelled it “bubble-gum DeLillo” [Miller]). And for all of Mitchell’s grandiose maximalism and intricate intertextuality, his love of the baroque and the byzantine, the hotchpotch of proper nouns and allusions, one of his most era-appropriate U.S. analogs is the minimalist socio-aesthetician Chuck Palahniuk, whose Fight Club rose to stratospheric levels of prominence after David Fincher’s movie version came out in 1999, the same year as Ghostwritten. Both authors, one in England and one in the U.S., via completely different approaches, pretty much saw it all headed the same way. The endings of both novels are eerily similar in their nihilistic glee, in the near-certainty of looming apocalypse. Their methods and pedigrees are dissimilar, but they clearly depict a world going to hell (as Ghostwritten’s follow-up, Number9dream, makes even more plain in a direct allusion to Dante’s Inferno and its nine circles of perdition). The penultimate chapter of Ghostwritten virtually predicts recent NSA outrages and the current administration’s backpedals and excuse- driven politicking, along with all the related subtopics of note surrounding

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 Sean Hooks On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten 41

cyber-crime, or cyber-populism, depending on one’s opinion of Julian Assange, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Anonymous and a variety of other ultra-modern entities. Mitchell predicting such conflicts a decade-and-a-half ahead of time is striking. This chapter – essentially the conclusion, since what follows, a section entitled ‘Underground,’ is more of an epilogue or coda – is the only portion of the novel not in first person and it operates as a series of blurbs, dispatches and excerpts from the Bat Segundo Radio show (Edward Champion subsequently took Mitchell’s character and literalized it). This terrestrial pre-digital form works as forerunner to the internet, much like 1989s Pump Up The Vol- ume – the subject of a great A.V. Club piece on films from “The New Cult Canon” – and this conclusion bookends the overture, as in the opening section our camera-eye non-protagonist literally calls himself a harbinger. He’s initially quite likeable and opposed to all the right things but he turns out to be a terrorist, an Okinawan Tyler Durden. “Okinawa” is the title and setting of that first segment, and from there begins a great westward progression through ten chapters (though ‘sections’ or ‘movements’ may be more apropos), each named after a place. Mitchell has spoken in interviews, such as his Paris Review “Art of Fiction,” about his anthropological instincts, his novels as a form of cartography informed by a desire to invert traditional West-to-East expan- sionism, whether motivated by a repudiation of Occidentalism or perhaps just post-colonial U.K. guilt. That second-to-last chapter, the crescendo/ denouement, is called “Night Train,” and here the place-name being a non- sedentary one both reflects the itinerant quality of the preceding pages and evokes Howard Zinn’s epigram, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Kinesis is a repeated Mitchell meme, as is interrogating the abrogation of personal responsibility. By the time we get to “” (the chapter nar- rated by an incorporeal ‘spirit’ – think David Bowie and Amanda Palmer simultaneously voicing Ariel from The Tempest), the westward migration is underway and we detour through Russia and continental Europe and the United Kingdom before finally landing in the States. Near the end of the book a different kind of spirit, a high-line hacker or perhaps a rogue fleck of artificial intelligence, hijacks a military satellite for a westerly sojourn of its own. This character, the aforementioned zookeeper, a form of AI as overseer, a beneficent HAL, is also gender neutral, and brags that he/she/it is, above all, not a fabulator. It even has four governing directives, reminiscent of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. Zookeeper tells The Truth, and does so as a disembodied voice, ringing up Bat Segundo’s radio program (which serves as a sort of analog-era 4Chan, Daily Kos or Oc- cupy bulletin board) as the world narrowly avoids self-destruction. This call-in show, despite being the receptacle for Zookeeper’s near-biblical

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 42 Sean Hooks missives, is not exactly highbrow colloquy but instead a haven for Talk Radio-era Eric Bogosian/Oliver Stone (or Alex Jones by way of Richard Linklater) conspiracy theory, a repository of late night neurotics and in- finite loneliness. Mitchell is not afraid to portray the blow-up-the-system point of view and its marginalized adherents sympathetically, as in a cri de coeur against debt where “Default!” is issued as a call to arms. He also provokes via the postulation that existence is an overwhelmingly huge if still potentially deterministic system in which attaining the deepest truths requires exploration of the prevalence of pervasive randomness at both the particle-level and at the level of ‘big history,’ topics pertinent to chaos theory advocates and multiversers alike. Quantum mechanics describes not just a scientific process of examination but a way to outline the underpinnings of Mitchell’s structure. In terms of the function-form interaction, the unreliability of science and history and religion weigh heavily on Mitchell’s mind in his first text.Ghostwritten is a book obsessed with the exposure of fakes and forgeries. It is youthfulness, all vigor and rigor, that bowdlerization-allergic Holden Caulfield sneer at indifference with which Mitchell shoves you into the chlorinated post-Baudrillard pool of not-quite-real life and expects you to be able to tell the difference between its palpably mimetic composition and that of the unblemished authenticity of an ocean. There are various signifiers to attest to his position. The word “cess- pit” appears again and again. The initial pages of the very first section present a gauntlet of tinted glass and synthetic ferns and utter adjectival falseness. A recurrent trope throughout the book is the different manifes- tations of fake smiles. We are shown the contrast between a secretary’s make-up and her pores. The silence that lies beneath elevator Muzak is noted. Fear of surveillance and coercion is there right from the get-go as television is presented DFW-style as a realm of implicit authoritarian command. Department stores are an Amazon-anticipating oligarchy of enforced obedience and unabashed compliance where convenience is the ultimate narcotic. The harbinger/terrorist, Kobayashi (note the Usual Suspects reference), a character inspired by the 1995 subway Sarin attacks, also goes by the code name Quasar, because he believes, as many brainwashed cultists do, that he pulses with truth. He calls himself a herald, but the more self-aware town crier here is young Mitchell. His second book, Number9dream, begins with an establishing move where his metaphor for society is the panopticon. Cloud Atlas is as obsessed with incarceration as anything this side of Kesey and Solzhenitsyn. Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet show a writer who has grown in nuance and complexity, in explorations of humanism and exertions of emotional intelligence, but it is in Ghostwritten that he

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 Sean Hooks On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten 43

is most clairvoyant, most tactile in his forecasting of the police globe we currently inhabit. There is an angst as well, a young writer’s rage against “the end- less chain of wanting and buying” (Mitchell 11) mixed with a mature perception of the coming international imperialism of want, of inculcated desire, of smartphones and insta-buying, of what would become the explicit subjects of works as varied as Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety and the populist polemics of Barbara Ehrenreich. And what does Ghostwritten offer as contrast or uplift? Well, there is that unspoiled sea. There are flowers, which are described as timeless. There is a young couple in love, a record store clerk straight off countryman Nick Hornby’s palette who falls in love with a customer. There is the proliferation of a lowbrow-highbrow hybridity, the proffering of the pop-is-not-a-four-letter-word POV (Richard Kelly would explore this in film just a couple of years later, starting with Donnie Darko), such as when Ghostwritten presents Lionel Richie’s “Hello” as an anthem and tenders the reader a money launderer who first sees a child’s apparition while watching Die Hard With a Vengeance. Jeremy Irons would be well- cast in many of Mitchell’s older British male roles and the influence of Henry David Hwang’s M. Butterfly holds sway here as well, as does a Cronenbergian fixation on how technologies both modern and primitive have embedded themselves in human life, also evocative of The Wind- Up Bird Chronicle, as is a specter who haunts all of Mitchell’s texts/stories. Also predictive is Mitchell’s choice to depart on his first fictive voy- age without a central protagonist, a device he’d reemploy – and double down on – in Cloud Atlas. It is a mantic venture and another Yank referent worth mention is Richard Powers, whose recent Orfeo shares many of Mitchell’s themes and who reads as a compositional influence. As David Gilbert stated in a 2013 interview with The Rumpus about his bravura throwback novel & Sons, “I sort of stole the structure from Richard Pow- ers. To have each chapter be about a certain character. Chances are the reader will like one and be moved to keep reading. Thank you, Richard Powers. It really is a great structure” (Gilbert). There is then a comment to Gilbert, “Thank god you’re not George R.R. Martin. I haven’t read any of the Game of Thrones books, but I’ve heard he’ll stay with a character for a hundred pages and switch over!” (qtd. in Gilbert). And that’s what makes the sans-protagonist Mitchell scheme so prophetic; it isn’t just for literature. Prestige TV is art now but in 1999 the success of Benioff & Weiss’s adaptation of Game of Thrones would’ve been inconceivable. The Sopranos was only beginning to rewrite the rules of television and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings was just starting to make film history, so a de-

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 44 Sean Hooks centralized smorgasbord like the televised rendition of Martin’s Westeros with its HBO-sanctioned nudity and bloody bacchanals wouldn’t have gone over even if it were Realism, much less a niche market like R-rated fantasy dragonplay. Gilbert’s follow-up reaction to the commenter is also telling: “I haven’t read those books yet, but boy, do I love the show. Love that dragon lady” (Gilbert). Forget the idea of a central protagonist and instead use that GoT approach, throw in enough whoremongering imps and sadistic monarchs and incestuous arch-eyebrowed hussy queens and hope some of ‘em gain traction and cull a broader audience that way. We didn’t have Facebook or YouTube yet in ’99 and link-hopping hadn’t fully horned in on standard establishing maneuvers, making the structure of Ghostwritten another way in which Mitchell prefigured (or maybe even configured) the future. This isn’t to give David Mitchell too much credit or to engage in hagiography. His antecedents are much noted. As I Lay Dying was posting the modern via fragmentation quite a while ago and Orwell was driving the neo-totalitarianism bandwagon with some help from the often under- acknowledged Yevgeny Zamyatin. The travelogue fugue-state book was birthed from the bowels of Burroughs and Bowles and Ballard. Conrad was carrying the flag that would inspire Post-Colonial Studies down the Congo River with Marlow and into the willful omission of setpieces in the nominally South American Nostromo, the continent that hatched speculators like Borges, Márquez, Cortázar, Arlt, Piglia, Bolaño and Aira while Europe progressed through Kundera, Winterson, Calvino and the Oulipians – all of these writers who staked out territory in and around the tributaries of the Mitchell-verse’s rivers long before he set up shop on the banks. Grounding it all within the vernacular of what is now the present is where Mitchell is most accomplished – an assembler marinated in dissembling. Ghostwritten’s obsession with fake smiles is thoroughly contempo- rary, 21st century, post-internet, post-service economy, post-globalized flatworld. They’re embroidered throughout every section of the novel’s curriculum via avatars both subtle and bedizened, festooned upon faces of all ages and races and classes, spewing lies and politesse in a multi- tude of languages. Even their non-smiles are still fake smiles. Take for example the Mishima-loving gym teacher who admires the samurai sep- puku nationalist masculinity but hasn’t read the man’s books – the keen apercu varietal of the fake smile. The converse? Someone who’s not a fake smiler? Miles goddamn Davis, a recurrent musical reference that kicks off the “Tokyo” section featuring the teenage record store clerk, Satoru, who falls in love with the one customer who isn’t smiling. Her friends are, and they’re the fake, the superficial, the loathsome gaggle, but this

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 Sean Hooks On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten 45

one girl stands out because she alone throbs with the pulpy, fleshy, sexy admirability of the nonconformist. The friends are magazine girls while she retains an air of books. They are clones and automatons but she is that rare non-commodity, the person who is unironically keeping it real. In the ensuing section, “Hong Kong,” the focus-character isn’t young; he’s a jaded businessman – “I grew up when I realized that everywhere was basically the same, and so were the women” (92) – but he wants the real too, not the real of a book girl amidst a coterie of magazine girls, but the real of the contentedly aged. This is Neal Brose (he will later appear in child form in Black Swan Green), who sees an elderly pair drinking tea together and muses about how much he’d love to trade his Rolex for the warmth of a shared beverage with a true companion. Tea is a motif in Ghostwritten, a symbol of the enduring real in a world which is more and more a pile of disposable detritus and commercialization. Neal, scarfing down a burger outside his office, bumps into Satoru and the bookish girl, named Tomoyo, and longs to hang out with them instead of going back up to his cubicle to finish his paperwork. Later, he engages with Jim Hersch, an American, a business acquaintance and friend of Denholme Cavendish (who reappears along with his brother in Cloud Atlas). Brose, office rat Everyman, stands in a gaggle of white collar middle-wigs laughing their best masters-of-the-universe laughs, but all that bluster, the cigars and beer bellies, these are fake smiles too, they’re trying to convince them- selves that they’re the bullies not the bullied, the bulls not the gored. Says Neal: “Jim Hersch smiled too, a photo smile of a manager in a local newspaper. And I was smiling the same smile, too” (104). Sameness, of course, being the enemy of movement, of innovation, of Bob Dylan and his multifarious incarnations, or of Bruce Springsteen’s synthesizing of Dylan, Elvis and Motown into his own collage, along with a dash of James Brown and a smidgen of Van Morrison and transmitted via the three-hour sweat-pouring marathon concert to attain the authenticity of exertion. Springsteen’s stories might sometimes be shtick but the sweat certainly isn’t, and thus as ‘real’ as Dylan’s move from the authenticity of the acoustic guitar and the protest song to that deeper authenticity – plugged-in and pissing off Pete Seeger and plowing through “Maggie’s Farm” at Newport or telling his hecklers at Manchester Free Trade Hall “I don’t believe you” and instructing his band to play it fucking loud before tearing into “Like A Rolling Stone.” Because for all of Mitchell’s love of classical and jazz and The Beatles, Ghostwritten plays more like the audacious early career enthusiasm of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan or The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. The most overt fake smilers – the politically minded – are in the “Holy Mountain” section. Near Mt. Emei, a nameless old woman endures

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 46 Sean Hooks the roiling of history that was 20th-century China. This uneducated and illiterate tea server starts the section hearing tales of Sun Yat-Sen, later sees her mountain become a state asset, a tourism artifact, as she then hears of the man called Chiang Kai-Shek battling the Japanese, and later still she is savagely assaulted by a former neighborhood boy seduced into the vadiation of the Red Guard. Maoism is “the worst of all times” (125) for this woman who spans the better part of a century because despite all the political movements and machinations and surface changes, the poor, and poor women in particular, always seem to take the worst of it, the brunt of history, right in the face, battered and disenfranchised by class and culture and gender, by their membership in the wrong nation or faction or tribe. A recollection from this section describes the enmasked distentions of hegemony: The communists came with early summer. There were only four of them—two men, two women. They were young, and wore neat uni- forms and pistols. My Tree told me they were coming. I warned my father, who, as usual, was asleep in his hammock. He opened one eye: “Fuck ‘em, they’re all the same. Only the badges and medals change.” My father was dying as he had lived. With the minimal effort possible. The communists asked if they could sit down in my Tea Shack and talk with me. They called each other “Comrade” and addressed me respectfully and gently. One of the men was the lover of one of the women – I could see that immediately. I wanted to trust them, but they kept smiling while I talked. I’ve always been wronged by smilers. (122) Bush/Thatcher/Reagan or Obama/Blair/Clinton, both trifectas traffic in unfulfilled promises and callow propaganda. And the same conscriptionist smiles emanate from hucksters and jivers at every level, from Army re- cruiters in mall parking lots, from college scouts at eighth grade basketball games, from Jehovah’s Witnesses showing up at the door unannounced, from the faces of Catholics after the Baptisms of their unconsenting infants, and from the snide snickers of overconfident atheists and above- it-all agnostics as well. The old woman survives her section, but at the turn of the 21st century her Tea Shack, a family institution passed down for over a thousand years, is subsumed in a sea of imitators, corporate teahouses and noodle stands. New History is being written, inscribed by the corporate-creative class, and writers, Mitchell acknowledges, are some of the worst fake smilers. They are liars by job description, authors hawking their wares, that calculated gambit after a reading or a panel at a conference or multi-tented book fair, in their I-care-about-my-audience costume, face contorted into a rictus of ersatz authenticity while they sign your book and thank you for coming, further proof of their I’m-an-artist façade, but underneath they too have the potential to be just another mer- chant, a smirker with a thesaurus, a seller of goods, an Etsy of the soul.

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 Sean Hooks On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten 47

In the “Petersburg” section the donnée is brilliantly rendered by Mitchell in a post-Soviet context. Each letter in the acronym U.S.S.R. is a fake smile writ large as the access-character here is a guard named Margarita (a tip of the cap to Bulgakov) at the Hermitage Museum, who plots with a covey of congenial crooks to steal one of the masterpieces, a Delacroix: Thinking about politics was too damned dangerous when I was growing up. Besides, what was this Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, really? “Republics” need real elections and I never saw any of those, I damn well never heard of any “Soviets”— I’m not even sure what one is. “Socialism” means the common people own the country, and all my mother ever owned was her intestinal parasites. And where was the “union”? (206) Here the American compatriot is Jonathan Lethem, who in The Fortress of Solitude memorably writes of how a gentrification is a scar left by a dream, and how Utopia is doomed to be the Broadway show that closes on opening night. Glib globalizing sameness arrives in Mitchell’s repre- sentation of post-Glasnost Russia as well. The high-end watches and faux teahouses and fast-food burgers are augmented by the sprawl of a more widespread and generic gentrification: Past the Stroganov Palace and the Kazan Cathedral. Past the Aeroflot office, and the scrubby Armenian Café. Past the flat where I made love to my Politburo member. It’s been turned into an American Express office now. All these new shops, Benetton, the Haagen-Dazs shop, Nike, Burger King, a shop that sells nothing but camera film and key-rings, another that sells Swatches and Rolexes. High streets are becoming the same all over the world. (211) One of Margarita’s cohorts in thievery is Jerome, an expert at painting cop- ies of masterpieces, a character who recalls the notorious Elmyr de Hory, the focus of Orson Welles’s F is for Fake. Jerome goes to a jazz club where he hears Miles Davis covered by subpar musicians and vows to do better in his own copying, his simulated Delacroix. Margarita converses with Tatyana (here the Russophile’s choice, Pushkin, gets the character naming rights), a mole, an Interpol agent posing as a fellow museum guard, who presents the case that the greatest false smile of all is love, which is really just a justification for egocentricity, for lust, for the transaction some call intercourse: “True, tender love is self-interest so sinewy that it only looks selfless . . . There is always a ‘why,’ because there is always something that the beloved wants . . . History is made of people’s desires. But that’s why I smile when people get sentimental about this mysterious force of pure ‘love’ which they think they are steering. ‘Loving somebody’ means ‘wanting something’” (Mitchell 223). Religion sells you heaven and hell with a fake smile too, but the dominions may not be as different as we

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 48 Sean Hooks often suppose. The Delacroix painting is Eve & The Serpent, and Satan’s sales pitch is, after all, so similar to Yahweh’s. The elect or the condemned, the seraphim and cherubim or the sinners and shades, they just wind up consuming different things based on the destination of overworld or underworld. Tragedy lurks on the flip-side of comedy’s coin and the true nature of postmodern life is vaudevillian. Heaven and hell are inextricable from each other. More so now than any time in history, horrors are almost immediately transmogrified into cartoonishness in this age of instant farce. The next section in Ghostwritten is “,” which concludes with a memorable scene inside the fake smile mill that is the modern- day casino. The point-of-view character is Marco (an iteration of the Invisible Cities version of Marco Polo), one of the many identity-seeking, career-averse citizens of the middle classes. A floater. Sort of a writer, sort of a drummer in a quasi-successful band. In debt, in between women, uninsured. The name of the band, The Music of Chance, is a shout-out to Paul Auster, and Marco the writer-drummer is a dilettante, a former Christian, a former Marxist, a wannabe Buddhist. A woman he hooks up with, Katy Forbes, has a poster of the Delacroix painting from the earlier chapter on her wall and she also used to be the girlfriend of Neal Brose from the “Tokyo” chapter. Here, authenticity is addressed as directly as it is anywhere in the novel: “Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth” (280). Marco is completing coitus with his primary squeeze, a woman named Poppy, when the condom breaks, a go-to hor- ror/comedy moment if ever there is one. This doesn’t incite a pregnancy but it reminds him of the vacuous nature of sexual conquest and he pon- ders if he’s in love with Poppy, who already has a kid of her own, and Marco has to decide if it’s time to “grow up,” to become a “family man,” to “settle down.” Does he want to become that most insidious breed of fake smiler, the parent? Society bestows fake smiles with less restraint and less grace than ever before, along with ribbons for participation and cheers for unaccomplished athletes and gold stars for mediocre academic performance and everywhere the pat of the back and the ‘You’re a special little snowflake’ and the smiles of encouragement for entitled narcissists and incipient entrepreneurs and passé posses of fame addicts whose empowerment may yet be our direst death knell. The gloomy concluding section of Mitchell’s most recent and most inconsistent novel, , and the masterful post-apocalyptic chapters of his most canonical book, Cloud Atlas, point to just how ugly those consequences might be on a global, humanitarian and environmental scale. It needs to be noted then that Mitchell’s leanings have at least a tan- gible undercurrent of nihilism. It never accedes to miserablism but deep

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 Sean Hooks On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten 49

down, perhaps he’s too smart for all the handholding and hopefulness, the gesturing and the jargon. He knows entropy is the (dis)order of the day. He sees that it’s all going south tout de suite – awry and amuck and astray, combustible, doused in petrol, the fuse already lit. The paradigm has sped up and the breaks on the roller coaster are rather worn and the plunge over the edge of The Singularity looms. The portrait of the future here in Ghostwritten (and in Number9dream, The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas) is of a reckoning. The loonies are off the path. The descent is well underway. Mitchell’s tessellate swirl reaches its apex near the end of Ghostwrit- ten as we move to Ireland for the “Clear Island” segment. If any group has made an art out of lyricality and absurdism over the centuries, it’s the Emerald Islers with their blarney and their land of myth and hymn, of beer and night pudding (okay, that last expression is Welsh, a favorite of Dylan Thomas’s), of Joyce and Yeats, hyperbolic and epiphanic and the Byzantium chaos of unheld centers, of Dublin as macro-microcosm, of Beckett’s delectable wights confined but careening across the kenoma. Mitchell is interested in interconnection, in micro-worlds presented via the Rococo, in his much-loved matryoshka structures, in narratives nested like nodes in a network, triangulatable points within the canon. Not just the literary canon, as science has its own etymologies and constructs and here Mitchell gives us a cat named Schrodinger and a Neils Bohr quote about what physics should and shouldn’t aspire to and a Heisenberg played not by Bryan Cranston but by an uncertainty principle and the notion that “Matter is thought and thought is matter. Nothing exists that cannot be synthesized” (Mitchell 336). Mo Muntevary, this section’s lead, is perhaps our most root-for-able character, a sampler-sized stand-in for a protagonist, a scientist who thought she was working for NASA and turned out to be developing a more lethal version of the Patriot Missile. She is the closest thing the book has to a heroine, largely because her defining trait is that she’s not a good liar. She cannot weave tangled webs (okay, that one’s Scottish). Her micro-world is her blind husband John and her stalwart son Liam and her sister Maisie who rides in a sidecar and com- municates with bees. The Goldberg Variations are alluded to – another Richard Powers confluence – and at this point in the novel it’s all starting to come together (and apart) in a systems analysis meets pattern recogni- tion sort of way. A recurring symbol is the bat, and many of the most noble characters in this text are bat-like, perhaps Mitchell’s way of saying we need to get beyond our image-obsession, to eschew the visual and tune up our cultural sonar and cultivate that thing we used to call ‘depth.’ This section is also explicitly about the real micropolis, the unseeable subatomic level, as well as the underlayers of globalism, the intersection

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 50 Sean Hooks of the military-industrial complex and string theory. There is allusion to the St. Secaire, a ritual form of blasphemy in which the Catholic mass is said backwards in order to elicit a necropsy-proof form of murder. It is the bizarre bazaar, the Gaelic voodoo, a Lovecraftian occult cross-faded with Texan paramilitary contractors who can find you anywhere in the world. It is proto-Wikileaks and Mo Muntevary is the unwilling whistleblower. She is a rationalist, a person who loves her family and her hometown and who wants humanism to triumph even though she knows that “any given system will decay from a complex order to a simple condition” (359) because “evolution and history are the bagatelle of particle waves” (360). This is the Butterfly Effect and ripples in space-time. This is the come- together-right-now of consciousness and coincidence. This is the jazz of Theory and the Dutch-tilted dolly shot of deconstructionism taken to its free radicals endpoint. This is a time in history when love-is-all-you-need has been replaced by need-is-all-you-love. For all his literary legerdemain, Mitchell is never solipsistic or vapid, nor overly entranced by his own structure-sorcery. He is a novelist with a hankering for the consequential. Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is on this wavelength as well, and like Mitchell he was born in 1969; why more hasn’t been written comparing the works of these two meticulous British wordsmiths is a curiosity. Perhaps because McCarthy’s worlds are more miniaturist and controlled, internal and clockwork, almost mobile-like, Calder-esque, whereas Mitchell’s are so sprawling and longform, external and plosive. McCarthy’s Remainder focuses on an amnesiac caught in a loop, living the same day over and over with a minute but significant ac- crual of change. It is a post-Robbe-Grillet neo-nouveau roman. Ghostwrit- ten’s characters overlap and connect both directly and indirectly as well. Mo Muntevary wants to build, but in the end all she can do is destroy. And the possibility (or increasing implausibility) of positive change in a progressively interconnected world is as prescient and poignant as it gets. Perhaps Mitchell and McCarthy are just orchestrating dirges for our time in different keys. In that last major section before the epilogue, the aforementioned “Night Train,” the landscape outside the passenger car windows is a surveillance world where everything is de-illuminated, if not straight- up apocalypsed now, featuring the Bat Segundo radio program and its host’s back and forth banter with Zookeeper. The narrative has gone to the edge of the abyss, a place where your smile, fake or real, is met only with emptiness and darkness and bottomless nothing, with a mirrorless vacuum, a place where the powers that be construct their own realities and the populace can only sift amongst the lies, because truth is liter- ally inaccessible, buried beneath the surfeit. As Gore Vidal said not long

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 Sean Hooks On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten 51

before he died: “We have no media that we can trust. Anybody can buy it. So how people are to be informed I don’t know” (Vidal). But it is also a section of convergence, of hope, of aspiration to a literary equivalent of the deep-delving etiological tapestry of life that Kieslowski achieved in film, most notably the Trois Colours trilogy, specifically the centrifugal closing moments of Red. To indulge in a biographically interpretative flourish, look at it this way. When stalked, the human often retreats; and yes, Mitchell hasn’t chosen Salinger’s Cornish, New Hampshire cabin or DeLillo’s refusal to email just yet, but Mitchell is not part of any identifiable literary commu- nity or movement, there is no contemporary Bloomsbury to spearhead. Maybe Mitchell, who lives in Clonakilty, Ireland, population 4,000, feels a kinship with those chased out of urbanity and unenamored with the suburbs. In Ghostwritten, the zookeeper is tracked by two dominant monoliths, perhaps the last two frontiers that remain; Zooey is hounded by agents from Hollywood and agents from the Pentagon. The latter see Zooey as a threat and the former see it as a commodity. Defense and Entertainment are destined, it seems, to be the only institutions left, with maybe a few smart kids as the remainders, young geniuses requisitioned into the health care field until they can be replaced by automated medical devices and nanotechnology. Though today’s world often seems defined by Dickian edifices and Blade Runner-as-reality, by a Tarkovskyan tropology, by a relentless background of the whitest noise, an abandoned and catcher-less rye, for all the forecasted ultra-conglomerates and corporatization, the concat- enation and congealing of massive amounts of wealth and power, the simple yet grand dichotomy of fake vs. real remains Mitchell’s ground zero. Ghostwritten is a book which A.S. Byatt called in its front matter one of the best first novels she’d ever read, and Byatt herself a writer who yearns for validity and who realizes that in our era authenticity is not the same thing as realism (or Realism). Mitchell began his literary career with a lauded boy genius novel that both presaged the future and earned recognition from the establishment in its own time at the turn of the 21st century, as Tarantino, Inarritu, Soderbergh, Carax, Sukorov and Kar-Wai were redefining film, and as the internet was redefining life. Why is visiting a Buddhist temple in person – the way Basho and Sora did it back in the wowo day – so much cooler than looking at one on Google images? Why is a magnificent quaff of hair preferable to an artful toupee or a blasé Bic-ing? Why are Auto-Tune and Photoshop and elec- tive cosmetic surgery so vexing? And yet we’re fine with fancy phones, emailing instead of sending a letter, and texting instead of a face-to-face chat with the local butcher, baker or candlestick maker (translation for

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 52 Sean Hooks younger readers: counter at chain supermarket, ‘cronut’-copyrighting guy with the line around the corner, Yankee Candle storefront at the mall). First-time novelist Mitchell was searching for meaning via his own version of ‘the new novel.’ He wasn’t content with outdated structures or devices even as he venerated the practitioners who preceded him. Some clichés he assassinated, others he assimilated. And while Mitchell’s tendencies are admirable and his honorifics well-earned, this is not to say that he comes out of the literary womb fully formed in Ghostwritten. The characters aren’t particularly deep or nuanced (or enduring). There’s an arbitrary nature to the ways in which he contrives to have their paths cross, along with a lack of warmth in his throughline that isn’t as- suaged until The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and even there ‘heart’ is only inconsistently a strength. Mitchell remains cerebral, more a novelist of the head, still a ways from the mastery achieved by Kenzaburo Oe in A Personal Matter and a good number of mile markers outside of Dostoevsky, who at his most detached and intellectual was capable of thoroughly hu- man developments (the protagonist of Notes From Underground withstands life in a way that Mitchell’s characters are only beginning to, though there are moments of supreme empathy in the most virtuoso scenes in Cloud Atlas, in his more astute observations on adolescence in Black Swan Green, and in some gut-wrench moments in Book II of Jacob de Zoet). And for all the earned approbation regarding his depiction of the handbasket to hell we’re consumerizing full of dross and pabulum, the anti-materialistic pro-autonomy purview is not exactly a new idea in literature. From Dos Passos’s continent-hopping expatriate incisiveness in Three Soldiers and Manhattan Transfer to Bellow’s Jefferson Lectures, from Pynchon’s word gluts to Coupland’s serio-comic coinages, from Cassandras as varied as McLuhan and Crichton to the genre-infused warnings of Bradbury and Vonnegut – the narrative of alarum, of dire tides turning the wrong way, is a concerto often played. As one reads reviews and criticism of Ghostwritten, there is in them more an appreciation of the glimpses at what the author could potentially go on to undertake rather than reverence for what he already accomplished in his inaugural book. It is not quite the appearance of a once in a generation game-changer, the now-for-something-entirely- different sheen of undeniable newness exuded by Eraserhead or Shadows or Citizen Kane, The Wire or The Sopranos, or history’s truly inimitable debut novels from The Virgin Suicides to Catch-22 to Wuthering Heights to Frankenstein to The Tale of Genji. Despite those quibbles and contentions, there is plenty of room for tribute and a sparkle of hope in Mitchell’s embodiment of a heroic my- thology within contemporary literature. Ghostwritten has earned a seat on the dais for any serious discussion of The Globalization Novel. His is

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 Sean Hooks On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten 53

an intrepid enterprise more schematic than dialogic and Mitchell is scho- lastically unpackable (there’s even been an academic conference devoted to his works already) but also book-club friendly. He’s a technique guy, not a poet or a politico. You don’t unravel his texts biographically like Henry Miller or Christa Wolf, or politically like the Communist Natural- ists or Ayn Rand, or metafictionally like T.C. Boyle, or linguistically like Nabokov, or sociologically like Fitzgerald, or psychologically like Malcolm Lowry, or stylistically like the poles of Faulkner and Carver. Mitchell is a nouveau-flux inhabitant of the breakneck post-tech paradigms of post- modernity and pastiche, a paragon of plurality. Ghostwritten even refers non-ironically to the Hand of God in a mainstream moment straight out of Stephen King’s The Stand. And Number9dream (combinatory story- smush which volumizes into a novel), Cloud Atlas (meta-matryoshka), Black Swan Green (coming-of-age), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (highly researched historical novel) and The Bone Clocks (fantasy) are all heavily in conversation with the theoretical applications of Genre. Mitchell is a melder, fiction’s Gram Parsons – who garners a meaningful mention alongside Emmylou Harris in Ghostwritten as well. We are veering towards a conception of the world where everything is genre-fied, where it’s all informed by identity or politics (or Identity Politics) and where it’s harder and harder to displace oneself from the grid, to unplug from the matrix. We are city dwellers, cosmopolitans in a polyphonic vortex even if we’re born in Nebraska, or a cowtown in Northern Ireland, or a rural enclave near Yugawara, . We almost all have some rudimentary form of access and entwinement now. We are in-the-know. We are portable. Our domiciles grow tinier. Marrieds are a minority in the U.S. for the first time in a century. Resource allocation and Malthusian concerns about global reproduction rates combined with increased lifespans are the order of the day. The weather is changing and David Mitchell seems to want to stay a beat ahead of the wave before it crashes onto the shores of whatever comes next (or perhaps to usher it in like a deity on a surfboard – an actual character from Number9dream). Mitchell is invested in new visions and new communities, in concur- rently exploding and saturating the form of the novel to give us something wholly its own. He wants to put you on a ride and to be a working class hero more Lennon than Lenin. But he’s also seen the writing and the signs on the walls, well, what’s left of the walls, what remains of Uruk, the remnants of civilization and literature and the shrinking voluntary reader base. Whatever you think of his work, he is a big picture thinker. He is not kin to micro-marketing or self-publishing, or to alt-lit with its snark-indies and often pretentious bloggers. Mitchell wants spectators. He wants to give you complicated AOR prog rock and blast his hits on

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 54 Sean Hooks

A.M. radio and be the literary incarnation of a global scale potpourri punk troubadour workaholic like Joe Strummer. Just because they say the meteor is coming doesn’t mean he wouldn’t rather be the T-Rex than the scurrying rodents, so he makes of his novels a varied array of colossal time machines. And hey, at least Mitchell is stepping up, trying to enliven an art form that so many say is dying. He’s out there with a shovel and a pickaxe and a trowel, with some bricks and mortar, trying to build something, and he’s already achieved quite a lot in his relatively young literary career. His portfolio is an imposing one. He is one of the few, the proud, the brave, the irony-immune, soldiering ahead, outfitted in his work clothes, and knowing, as Emily Dickinson wrote a long time ago, just yesterday, that mirth is the mail of anguish, that our fake smiles are symptomatic of a species contending with its own demise. Los Angeles

Works Cited Gilbert, David. “The Rumpus Book Club Discussion with David Gilbert.” Interview. Ed. Lauren O’Neal. TheRumpus.net. The Rumpus, 29 Aug. 2013. Web. 12 Jan. 2015. Miller, Laura. “’Ghostwritten’ by David Mitchell.” Review. Salon.com. Salon Media Group, 10 Oct. 2000. Web. 12 Jan. 2015. Mitchell, David. “David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No 204.” Interview by Adam Begley. The Paris Review 193, Summer 2010. Web. August 2012. ---. Ghostwritten. New York: Vintage, 2001. Print. Roake, Jessica. “So Long, Holden.” The Slate Book Review. Slate.com, 2 Nov. 2012. Web. 19 Jan 2015. Vidal, Gore. “Gore Vidal on Writing.” CSPAN.org. C-SPAN, 10 Jan. 2009. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015