Goodreads | Black Swan Green

Patrick rated it:

(review of isbn 0340822791)

07/25/08

Read in July, 2008

recommended to Patrick by: Steve
recommends it for: Fans of 'Freaks and Geeks'

You never know what you're going to get when you read a 'coming of age' book. When you get right down to it, they're often very indulgent and narcissistic exercises in creative non-fiction masquerading as the experience of the typical (or atypical, as they'd want you to believe) teenager or young adult. Other times they can be very true to life and touching, if not altogether inspiring.

'Black Swan Green' sort of splits the difference between these two results. It's not a bad book, b...more
You never know what you're going to get when you read a 'coming of age' book. When you get right down to it, they're often very indulgent and narcissistic exercises in creative non-fiction masquerading as the experience of the typical (or atypical, as they'd want you to believe) teenager or young adult. Other times they can be very true to life and touching, if not altogether inspiring.

'Black Swan Green' sort of splits the difference between these two results. It's not a bad book, but it's not the great one it strives to be either. David Mitchell treats his protagonist, Jason Taylor, a painfully sensitive and shy young British boy with a stuttering problem, as a medium for spouting off all the lessons he learned from his own sensitive and shy young childhood. While Taylor's experiences feel mostly real, the book gets bogged down in describing the culture of being a boy on the cusp of the cusp of manhood.

The reader is meant to understand that Taylor is a precocious young boy who strives to be nothing more than completely average, going to great lengths to hide his intelligence and insight at every turn. However, either he is the most self-aware child in the history of literature, or Mitchell goes way overboard in trying to make his less-than-subtle point about the horrors of young adulthood. I lean towards the latter. Mitchell puts words in his young protagonist's mouth that, while maybe he understands on a very basic, almost instinctual level, would never be able to eloquently express. For example, in a scene where one of the local bullies offers Jason a cigarette, Jason accepts even though he doesn't smoke, while his inner monologue explains that " A middle-ranking kid like me shouldn't refuse an invitation from an older kid like Grant Burch." Maybe not, and it's entirely likely that Jason understands this on an intrinsic level, but there is not a 13 year old alive who would offer up that explanation off the cuff.

Mitchell continues to provide Jason with clever insights throughout the book, such as ' Hate smells like burnt fireworks' right before two bullies fight one another, or 'The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and my future. The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I'll die in. (Has it been built yet?) Cars're rooms. So are woods. Skies're ceilings. Distance're walls. Wombs're rooms made of mothers. Graves're rooms made of soil.' Really? Come on. Lovely sentiments, certainly, but unfit to be coming out the mind of a 13 year old. It betrays the realism of the character and makes you very, very aware that you're reading a book written by a man pushing 40 trying to remember what it was like to be 13.

That said, the book is not without merit. While it could afford to be about 100 pages shorter (there are entire chapters, most notably the entire bit with 'Madame Crommelynck', that could be excised without hindering the story in the least, in my opinion. I dreaded picking up the book for long stretches, mostly because I'd be entrenched in chapters full of explicitly stated pretentious introspection that was far beyond what a 13 year old can muster), there are also stretches where the book really evoked the awkwardness and pain of growing up, and that was where it was most effective. This was especially true as the book wound down and we were given more of Jason's school life, and the tortures he faced on most days. It could be difficult to read, and reminded me of just how awful middle school really was, but it also felt real in a way that much of the rest of the book did not. When Mitchell focuses on this part of Jason's life, the book can truly be considered a success.

Mitchell is a talented writer, and he so deftly handles some situations (such as Jason's home life, which he can tell is going astray, but he isn't quite sure just how far until it happens) that it actually makes you angry that he is so explicit in dealing with the thoughts and emotions of others. In the end, he's left with a decent book that drags painfully in stretches and gives too little credit to the reader, but is overall a good effort at recreating the small traumas and triumphs of the end of childhood....less

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