Black Swan Green.

My reading of the entire David Mitchell catalogue continued during the offseason, as I read but never reviewed The Thousand Autumns of Jasper de Zoet (which I loved – brilliant prose and a compelling story), and now brings me to Black Swan Green, an autobiographical memoir set in Ireland in 1982. It’s the most straightforward of Mitchell’s novels that I’ve read, with relatively few references to people and events in his other novels, and a lovely, bittersweet coming-of-age story that reads like a way better Belfast.

Jason Taylor is Mitchell’s stand-in, a 13-year-old boy who lives with his parents and his older sister Julia, attending a boys-only school where he’s one of the less popular kids, due in part to his stammer. He’s friends with Dean Moran, one of the few kids less popular than he is; gets bullied by a few of the street toughs from the town; and harbors a quiet crush on Dawn Madden, who ends up dating one of the worst bullies in Black Swan Green, Ross Wilcox. Jason’s misadventures nearly always start in mundane ways – he’s at school, on the bus, at a carnival, at home, or just playing in the woods – but end up touching on one or more of the major themes: his parents’ fractious marriage, his difficulty in almost every social situation due to his stammer, and the difficulty of fitting in that teenage boys everywhere face. So much of Jason’s inner monologue revolves around trying to be cool enough that he’ll be accepted – or at least not bothered – by the town’s bullies, but not to attract undue attention and thus becomes a target for them for an entirely new reason.

Jason is a fantastic character, one I wish we’d see come back again in another novel – although I suppose he’d be a successful writer as an adult. I certainly saw enough of myself in him, despite the outward dissimilarities between us (I never had a stammer, and Jason is more comfortable fighting & playing sports than I was), to feel like both he and his story were realistic. Mitchell gives him everything a protagonist should have, building out Jason’s moral compass and personality through a series of normal events that many kids would face, from finding a lost wallet to standing up to bullies to coping with the conflict between loving your parents and recognizing that it’s not cool to be seen with them. It’s a more modern interpretation, but you can interpret Black Swan Green as the protagonist’s struggle against a world where toxic masculinity is the norm, a world into which he does not fit.

That does mean that the other characters are less fleshed-out, especially Jason’s dad, who is just kind of a dud as a person – although I would guess most of us know a Michael Taylor who talks a good game but doesn’t post when it’s his turn to be a good father or husband, and it’s hardly surprising when he eventually fails at all of his roles. Julia doesn’t get enough time on the pages, as she heads off to college partway through the book, but she’s the most interesting secondary character, as she softens towards her younger brother as both her time at home comes to a close and she better foresees the storm brewing in their parents’ marriage.

Black Swan Green – which has put the Charlatans’ “Sproston Green” in my head for the last week – doesn’t have the mystical elements that appear in most of Mitchell’s books, and other than a mention of Robert Frobisher, none of the major names who pop up in the Mitchell Literary Universe appear here. (Some characters here show up in minor roles in other books, especially Cloud Atlas, but none rang a bell for me so long after I read that work.) That’s for the better, as it would have been jarring to have that stuff show up in a roman à clef, unless the Horologists really did show up in Mitchell’s childhood. One warning: There’s a fair bit of homophobic language here, although I’m sure this is accurate to the time period and setting – I was 9 in 1982, in New York rather than Ireland, but this was the vernacular of teenaged boys in the 1980s – and it’s hardly glorified. It’s unsurprising to see Mitchell do straight fiction this well, and as much as I enjoy his broader and more inventive plots, this is among the best coming-of-age novels I’ve ever read.

Next up: Ellen Hendriksen’s How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety.