Take Me on a Roller Coaster

In the Department of Self-Promotion, I just reviewed David Mitchell’s new novel, Black Swan Green, for the Toronto Star. You can read the review here. The Roxy Music song referred to in the piece, by the by, is “Virginia Plain,” and here’s an extra-kazookery version.

• Roxy Music, “Virginia Plain #2” (BBC session, July 1972)
  

(Buy Roxy’s debut here.)

And in the Department of More Yakking About Books, a couple recent rollicking good reads I’d recommend are

(1) Paul Glennon’s The Dodecahedron, a short-story cycle made up of 12 discrete interlocking pieces. And by “interlocking” I mean filled with recurring character types & situations, so that each story echoes several others, if not all the others. Brainy & carefully worked out but also a blast, since it keeps distilling narrative down to its rawest delights – brief expository tales of missing fathers & trapped explorers & sinister centuries-long plots. Think Barthelme, Barth, Borges, Calvino, etc.

and

(2) Stephen Wright’s The Amalgamation Polka, a Civil War tall tale about a well-meaning young man’s misadventures in prewar New York state and his horrific experiences during the war. A lumpy, misshapen book that lurches from dry whimsy to high moral outrage to sheer grotesquery, all of it (or most of it) delivered in meandering faux-Victorian prose. I’d like to stress that that last sentence is meant to be nothing but admiring & complimentary: I loved the novel’s crazy tone shifts & anything-goes structure & winding sentences. Though I’d admit that the tone gets too diffuse over the last fifth or so of the book, which doesn’t really come off. (I could go on in more detail, but hey, that would just be noise to anyone who’s not read the thing.)