BOOK - David Mitchell's "Black Swan Green"

Jason Taylor, the stammering, bullied, average protagonist of Black Swan Green, may only be thirteen years old, and he may think the world (or at least this titular Worcestershire village) revolves around his problems. David Mitchell, however, the ambidextrous author behind this child's narrative, knows that there are bigger things, and though he never leaves this small portion of England, he manages to cover the breadth of 1982 in a series of thirteen succinct chapters, each a short story in that never-ending tale of life.

Under the cloak of innocent youth, Mitchell deftly moralizes and assimilates a whole history of culture, ranging from observations on the hated gypsies to a failing marriage to the Falkland war. ("War's an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins . . . War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers, it's a lottery.") For the majority of the novel, however, we stay focused on Taylor's struggles to fit in with the societal caste system of his peers, from his mimicry of a cigarette-smoking cousin, to his possible induction into a secret club, to his secret double-life as Eliot Bolivar, the poet of Black Swan Green.

Not for a second does the novel feel repetitive, even as Taylor faces the repeated humiliations not just of his peers, but his own internal voices, Maggot and Hangman (personifications of his rage and stutter). No real surprise: Mitchell showed the world with Cloud Atlas that he could turn a Nabokovian phrase in any genre, and now that he's sticking to one, he runs the gamut of wordplay, from alliteration to onomatopoeia and back, replete with neologisms and slang that run slick as silk across the page. "When a stammer stammers their eyeballs pop out, they go trembly-red like an evenly matched arm wrestler, and their mouth guppergupperguppers like a fish in a net."

When you have an uncanny ability to write prose like that, the subject often doesn't matter -- you've crossed into an aesthetic and comedic form of prose that subsists on its own belletrism. But without going surreal, like Tom Robbins, Mitchell remains grounded, like a far more playful Twain, and uses almost Burgessian slang (e.g., "grinny-zitty," "bumfluff") to pepper his resourceful passages on the troubles of youth. If it seems implausible that almost every single misfortune comes Taylor's star-crossed way, think about your childhood: didn't it seem that way?

Energetic and ambitious descriptions often rule the day in Black Swan Green, but because of their delicious details, they don't usurp the plot: they subsume it. "A peardrop sun dissolved in a sloped pond. Superheated flies grandprixed over the water. Trees at the height of their blossom bubbled dark cream by a rotted bandstand." The best passages in the novel do both, and how better to end this review than with Mitchell's best:

"Now her grubby soles met like they were praying. Now his skin was glazed in roast-pork sweat. Now she made a noise like a tortured Moomintroll. Now Tom Yew's body jerkjerked judderily jackknifed and a noise like a ripping cable tore out of him. Once more, like he'd been booted in the balls. Her fingernails'd sunk salmony welts into his arse. Debby Crombie's mouth made a perfect O."

For some lucky people, a book brings that much pleasure too, and if it's possible, Black Swan Green, the best book of the year, will leave you with that perfect O.