Another Story in Tweets

cloudsA fan of British author David Mitchell—I know, I know, lots of people didn’t like Cloud Atlas—I’m happy he’s experimenting again. This time with a short story, “The Right Sort,” in tweets (read it here, from the bottom up). First tweet: We get off the Number 10 bus at a pub called ‘The Fox and Hounds’. ‘If anyone asks,’ Mum tells me, ‘say we came by taxi.’ The narrator sees the world in staccato bursts—“bite-sized sentences”—because he’s taking his mom’s Valium. I’ve read the story so far, and cannot tell yet whether this device feels like the medium calling attention to itself. Already, though, as in his excellent novel Black Swan Green, Mitchell deftly captures the voice and preoccupations of an early adolescent British male.

Mitchell has tried other innovations: a linked narrative in his first book, Ghostwritten, which takes a while to take shape in the reader’s mind (“we’re all connected”!); Number 9 Dream, where you aren’t exactly sure where the dreams begin and end, though it would make a terrific mixed manga/live-action movie; and, of course, Cloud Atlas, where you work forward in time getting the first half of five semi-linked and intergenerational stories, followed by a whole story set in the future, then step backward through the decades with the latter half of the five. (Amazon includes a reader advisory that this is NOT a misprint!) More a straight novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, was one of my favorite reads of 2012.

“The Right Sort” walks “the tightrope between the fabulous and realism,” Mitchell said in a recent interview in The Guardian, and with his books, he’s proved he’s up for such highwire acts. This outing may soften up the media landscape for a new novel coming out this fall.