“Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you look at green, where’ve the yellow and the blue gone?”

David Mitchell is the most unevenly talented writer whom I’ve read. He’s occasionally a master storyteller, inventive in his story structure and sequencing of events, capable of writing beautiful sentences and using language in mind-bending ways, and yet writes some truly atrocious dialogue and scenes. He's frustrating to write about. I'd almost classify him as a guilty pleasure read because he's so heavily invested in themes of sci-fi and fantasy in many of his books that it muddies the water of his literary merit. Take Cloud Atlas for example, a novel with some very nice sentences and a unique structure that effectively establishes universality among the contained-within stories' themes, but whose stories themselves held very little weight for me -- overly long, badly written, and/or shallow. Ghostwritten had a similar impact. And yet, I was entranced by Number9dream (granted, I had read it a while ago) and Jacob DeZoet was quite good as well. Fortunately, Black Swan Green is the most traditional novel in Mitchell's bunch. While it does have a (very well executed) storytelling gimmick, in which each chapter is a discrete story from one month of the narrator's year, it is otherwise a fairly simple bildungsroman, leaning toward autofiction.

Jason Taylor is as realistic as any thirteen-year-old boy character I've read, and Mitchell (writing about his home town in Worcestershire) nails the slangy dialogue of his youth. More impressively, he quite accurately and impassively (for all of his other emotive faults) captures the precocious, harsh social dynamics of male adolescence. The bullying in the novel especially feels quite severe. And yet, it is frustrating that there is this sense of "bad writing" as I read Mitchell. It's quite confounding. Maybe I am simply less open to some of his writing choices. For example, his moderately heavy usage of italics and "all caps" dialogue creates a sense that I'm reading a book, in which characters are talking like characters and not real people. Yet conversely, I will read some of Mitchell's interactions between Jason and his speech pathologist and identify the authenticity in their interactions. If I had to summarize the book's writing strengths and weaknesses, I would point to Mitchell's world building as particularly strong -- his depiction of the people, their interactions and beliefs, and the historical context of Black Swan Green clearly comes from some personal place -- and his creation of Jason Taylor and his coming-of-age moments fleshed out in each chapter and how they connect and culminate in a kiss (corny, I know, but definitely realistic for an adolescent) and the divorce of his parents as rather strong too. But some of his writing needs work and takes the reader out of the story at moments. Otherwise, if you can tolerate that, Black Swan Green is a very nice novel.

Among the chapters themselves, none of them were weak (with Solarium probably being the weakest due to the poorly written Crommelnyck), but I was gripped mostly by Rocks. All of the stories could exist as short stories, and in fact for a good portion of the novel I was second guessing whether I was reading a short story collection. Yet they all connected quite beautifully as they slowly develop a character arc for Jason, underpinned by his popularity with peers and shifting family dynamics. Rocks took the cake for me though because it very smartly revealed the irreconcilable and fatal philosophical/moral difference between Jason's mother and father through a seemingly small financial disagreement. As the chapter progresses, the background noise of Cold War conflict seems to mirror the long-going fight between mom and dad, and ends with a clear result (as does the fight between parents that leads to a devastating embarrassment for Jason's mother). But Mitchell beautifully ends the chapter with Jason representing an (otherwise absent in the presence of conflict) empathetic perspective of youth: "...not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right."

And lastly, the book ends with this beautiful interaction between Jason and his older sister, which puts a bow on the novel with a sensitive understanding that Jason is merely in the throes of adolescence:

"It'll be all right." Julia's gentleness makes it worse. "In the end, Jace."
"It doesn't feel very alright."
"That's because it's not the end."