What Are You Reading, Wendy Rawlings?

David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (Vintage, 1999) is a monster of a book, and even more of one when you realize that this is the guy’s first novel (he has since written four more, including the hugely popular Cloud Atlas), and that Mitchell has just barely turned the corner on forty (he was born in 1969). I’ll admit up front that I have a strong (almost malodorously strong) preference for small, lyric novels: my favorites include Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, James Salter’s Light Years, and Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place. By “small,” I mean that I tend to like novels that are light on action and plot, with closely observed details that often focus on domestic and psychological interiors. I’m really not a big book sort of person, but one of my students gave me Ghostwritten as a thank-you gift after he defended his MFA thesis, so I sort of felt obliged to read it. “Uh-oh,” I thought as I scanned the table of contents, which contained ten chapters with titles like “”Okinawa,” “Petersburg,” “London,” and “Mongolia,” “I’m about to be sent all over the freaking world.” Worse, when I perused the novel to see what I was in for, I counted nine first-person narrators, one of whom appeared to be a “noncorpum” entity that transmigrates into a series of human hosts. I remembered how pissed off I’d been years earlier when I’d read Mona Simpson’s terrific novel, Anywhere But Here and discovered that the point of view switched all of three times. How would I manage to keep engaged through nine narrators, one of whom wasn’t even human?

I’m happy to report that Mitchell’s risky narrative experiment passed this cranky reader’s test with flying colors. The separate first-person narrative strands in this novel are so utterly distinct and detailed that I found myself immediately immersed in each one, so much so that I often had the strange feeling at the end of a chapter of having myself transmigrated into a kind of fictional host, a narrator whose story inhabited me so completely that I temporarily forgot my own identity as well as all the novel’s preceding narrators. When Mitchell takes me into the mind of a terrorist who belongs to a cult in Okinawa, I fully enter that terrorist’s mind. And when he takes me into the mind of a female Irish physicist on the run from Pentagon officials, I somehow become part of that physicist’s mind. I won’t spoil the ending, which is as intellectually challenging as it is aesthetically pleasing, but I will say I haven’t had such an exhilarating experience reading a novel since my parents gave me a Wizard of Oz series book each time I managed not to cry during a visit to the orthodontist. Maybe I am a “big book” person after all, when it’s a magic carpet ride of a book.

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Wendy Rawlings is the author of a collection of short stories, Come Back Irish, and a novel, The Agnostics. She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama and is the hippest person I know. Period. (And she loves dogs and that's super cool.)