A Taoist in Tokyo
Finished David Mitchell’s number9dream the other day. Got a signed hardcover copy for Rs 250 at the Strand exhibition last month, talk about a bargain. Really enjoyed the book. Over the years I’ve grown so weary of US-centred books and characters; I mean, it’s bad enough that Hollywood seems to drown us in Americana without having to escape to an allegedly fictional world that turns out to be, well, the backlot of a tired national imagination. With a few exceptions like Phillip Roth, I try to avoid most American authors. They rarely have anything to say about the human condition–but a great deal of tiresome noise to make about ‘being American’. Usually in the post-911 world. Yeah, guys, sometime try to see how the other 9/10′s of the world lives.
Anyway, Number9dream is also an American novel. Critics have lashed Mitchell for doing a touristy version of the Japanese novel. Fair enough, or, critics being critics, unfair enough. So Mitchell’s Japan is a playground for an American’s imagination, but Mitchell has lived there all his life, and all his characters and settings and events are Japanese, so it’s still a lot more of a Japanese experience than, say, the pseudo-existentialism of Lost in Translation. The book, like Mitchell’s previous, debut novel Ghostwritten, and his Booker-nominated Cloud Atlas, is hugely over-written, and that puts a lot of potential readers off Mitchell. It also puts him squarely in the league of American writers who love to hear their own voices prattle on endlessly–but inventively, ingeniously, and imaginatively. I’d put him safely in the company of David Foster Wallace and Neal Stephenson and even Bret Easton Ellis, among others.
Number9dream is very much a modern urban picaresque along the lines of Wallace’s The Broom of the System, Ellis’ Glamorama, and Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. It has the same hallmark qualities of a wild imagination let loose in an urban setting, utter disdain for plot and structure (though this usually conceals an over-obsession with structure itself), and a very male, very personal, very emotionally rooted quest of some sort. In this case, the protagonist (a Japanese youth) is questing for his father, whom he has never met or known. It’s a wild ride worth taking and I’d strongly recommend it. Which is not the same as saying it’s Mitchell’s best. Either Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas are leagues ahead. But then, they’re not half as fun.
It also reminded me of another novel I’d read a whale of a while ago. A Taoist on Wall Street by David Payne. It’s out of print, not surprisingly, and I’d read it ages ago. I remember I was working in an ad agency back then, 1988 I think, and one of the partners, Ajit Balakrishnan, had lent it to me. It was a massive tome, owing more to Eighties glam novelists like Jay McInerny and Ellis (again) but was also an astonishingly good read. I don’t think Payne ever wrote anything again, but if you had to write just one novel, that would be the one.
Dave Eggers too. He writes the same playful, autobiographical musings disguised as a silver bullet gone mad kind of stuff.
And there I go, starting out by saying I’m so tired of reading American authors who bear their 911 badges so proudly, and end up talking about a half dozen American novelists anyway. Can’t kill them all, can’t live without them. Might as well read them I guess. :~)
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005 at 12:09 am. It is filed under Ashok.
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