Currently (2010) David Mitchell is the “it” author. There have been many articles about him, especially one in the New York Times Sunday magazine section. He is said to have re-defined the novel. You can read about him in the Wikipedia article.
Mitchell’s novels are as follows:
- Ghostwritten (1999)
- number9dream (2001)
- Cloud Atlas (2004)
- Black Swan Green (2006)
- The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)
If you like T.C. Boyle (especially his short stories), you will also enjoy David Mitchell.
Let me tempt you with “Ghostwritten”, his first novel. Each chapter is a somewhat self-contained short story, but not really. The chapters eventually wrap around to where they started. But the fun “trick” is that each chapter after the first contains within some sly reference back to the previous chapter. If you did not read that previous chapter carefully then you might just miss the reference in the succeeding chapter. I’ll give you a hint for chapter one, namely, “telephone call”.
To tempt you a bit more I’ll describe chapter one. All chapters are written in the first person as I recall. In chapter one the speaker is the Japanese cult fanatic who personally released the sarin gas in the Tokyo subway. In the entire chapter while he is fleeing the scene and hiding in some remote guest house he is ruminating about his cult under the leadership of someone always referred to as “His Serendipity”. He interprets each and every event in the unwavering context of someone so completely brain-washed that he is deceived about everything.
Mitchell has a clever and often witty way with words. I do worry that his choice of words may be trendy enough that his book might some day be outdated.
Some chapters are manic (think Thom Jones), but not all. There is a somewhat poignant chapter in which a brilliant woman scientist tries to retire to her beloved small Irish (Celtic) island in order to escape being forceably employed by the CIA. This chapter relates to a following chapter about a nighttime radio talk show in an astoundingly clever way.