Newspaper Article

POSTMODERNIST HEIR, BEAUTIFUL DREAMER

Corey Mesler Special to The Commercial Appeal Corey Mesler is a longtime book reviewer for The Commercial Appeal

2002

Overview

\"We are both busy people, so let's cut the small talk,\" the book begins, and just like that we are thrust into the narrator's dream world. The thin line between fantasy and reality is traced throughout his long account, enticing, enchanting and disturbing. The storyteller is Eiji Miyake, a resident of an ultramodern Tokyo, who is searching for his father, an enigmatic ghost, who disappeared when Eiji and his twin sister Anju were infants. Eiji's quest is Pynchonian, like the quest for who or what V. is, in [Thomas Pynchon]'s novel of that name, a search that will take Eiji through a labyrinth of seamy, underground life. [David Mitchell] makes the modern city an organic machine, a clockwork orange, lively, deadly, malignant and frenetic. It is T. S. Eliot's \"unreal city\" merged with the dark, nihilist vision of Irvine Welsh. \"Now I understand what fuels dronehood,\" Eiji says. \"This: you work or you drown in debt and the underclass. Tokyo turns you into a bank balance with a carcass in tow.\"

• Publisher: Gannett Media Corp
• Subject: Lennon, John / Mitchell, David / Miyake, Eiji / Pynchon, Thomas