black swan green

So I finished Black Swan Green a couple weeks ago, read it during my two days home from school nursing pink eye or paint that got in my eye from doing the ceilings, still not sure which it was but it cleared up nicely after a steroid/antibiotic combo. I can't recommend Black Swan Green highly enough, it was such a wonderful book. I love coming of age stories. Even though I'm now middle aged I feel like I can relate to adolescent angst so well, probably because I remain as socially maladroit as a thirteen year old. There don't seem to be any memorable coming of age stories told from a girl's point of view but Catcher in the Rye, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and this book are my three favorites in that genre. Oh I can't forget part two of Michael Chabon's A Model World which is a wonderful novella about this boy Nathan Shapiro, after reading it I just wanted to hug Michael Chabon. I've been listening to Summerland in the car with Owen, Oona is staging a mild protest about the book on tape choosing select times to start reading her Highlights out loud to drown out Summerland. I love listening to Michael Chabon reading Summerland, he does different voices for the various characters. It just might be better than reading his books on my own, because I love how endearingly geeky he is and his writing is so funny and kind and beautiful. There's a comment about Michael Chabon by his wife, Ayelet Waldman in the back of one of his books. She talks about how brilliant, talented and handsome he is, but how he's also arrogant, a bad dancer, and knows far too much about klingon politics and the lyrics to Yes songs. Even that criticism is endearing. I do not know either of them, aside from interviews I've heard where they seem to have a loving repartee when commenting about the other, but I truly envy people that have that, where you truly love the person faults and all, in a sense love them because of those faults.

So back to Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. Maybe I love it because the narrator, Jason Taylor, is thirteen in 1982, the same age as I was that year, but he's in England when all the great British 80s music is going on. Maybe it's that so much change in this boy's life is encapsulated in a year. It could be that I love it because Jason stammers and writes poetry under a pseudonym or that it's written in such a engaging colloquial style where, at times, Mitchell will have triple contractions. He captures the feeling of not fitting and adolescent longing, which can bring up such confusing feelings of ambivalence, like he was just thirteen yesterday. There was one line, so brief, where Jason sees Dawn Madden wet from the rain and wants to go over and suck the water from a lock of her hair, it seemed so erotic and charged with that energy of when your body first hums over someone of the opposite sex. I'd really like to read his other novels too but I'm a wee bit worried because they aren't as linear, they'll shoot back and forth in time, place and can have up to nine narrators, it seems a bit daunting but if they're as well written as Black Swan Green it shouldn't be a problem.