. Spinning .

Mitchell appears to use the chapters as episodes, focusing on an incident unrelated to the previous but consistent with a linear timeline as each refers to something happening in the prior chapter.  It seems that Jason faces a new problem (skating, stuttering, smoking) in each, and comes out of each a bit changed, a bit more mature perhaps. 

Mitchell also takes advantage of the interaction of the characters, although he threw out a round of Jason’s classmates with full names that served to put me on notice to pay attention and remember them.  Certain characters are obviously more meaningful and are skillfully reinforced by the author.

Just as each of these are stages of growth, each can clearly stand on its own as a short story I suspect.  I’m liking it better, though I realize that I’m drawn into novels that emphasize lyrical language and makes abundant use of metaphor and simile as descriptive devices of not just visual display, but of deepening the characters.

There are mixed feelings about this book; after finishing the first chapter I see much I like yet there’s an ambivalence and I question the rave reviews I seem to recall when it came out.

First of all, I must mention the "exploratory" side of Mitchell’s writing.  Since punctuation has already been played with by Faulkner, McCarthy, and others, Mitchell instead has focused on passing off the dialect of his narrator, a thirteen year-old boy, as realistic via contractions:

I wouldn’t’ve argued

But the dark’d shuffled itself and the sour aunt’d gone.

That’s fine; I do like realistic language but just as with accents, the reader imagines them without having to have them spelt (sic) out.  Some of these, such as "dark’d" (meaning dark had) are a halt in the flow of reading in opposition to their intention of smoothing out by melding together a group of common words.  I do it all the time in emails and blog postings, but to the extent of a novel it will either be overcome or become downright annoying.

On the good side, there is a hint of magical realism as  Jason, skating on the pond after his friends have departed, sees the figure of another skater who may be a ghost.  He is injured in a fall and goes to a house where a strange old woman, the "sour aunt" lives (maybe) with her brother.  There is an almost fairytale encounter as she fixes his ankle and gives him something to drink that puts him to sleep.  This is a very interesting intrusion of the make-believe in the midst of a very down-to-earth narrative point of view. 

Not gripping, but certainly intriguing.

Mitchell draws the characters well, and in the reflections of the protagonist (Jason–we know this because his mother has addressed him at some point) we do get some nice stuff:

Nobody’d be out on the frozen lake, I’d suspected, and there wasn’t a soul.  Superman II was on TV. (…) Clark Kent gives up his powes just to have sexual intercourse with Lois Lane in a glittery bed.  Who’d make such a stupid swap?  If you could fly?  (p. 17)

So the voice puts the character at a certain stage in his adolescence. It also gives us some of that wonderful child’s eye way of looking at things, which often includes simile, but this one just doesn’t work for me:

Overhanging trees tried to touch my head with their fingers.  Rooks craw…craw…crawed, like old people who’ve forgotten why they’ve come upstairs. 
A sort of trance.  (p. 17)

There’s beauty in the branches as fingers, but trees don’t normally overhang; branches do. It sounds like Mitchell got the image and then didn’t quite know how to put it into words.

The "rooks craw..craw…crawed"–well that works well, giving us the onomatopoeia of the sound.  But coupled with the simile "like old people who’ve forgotten why they’ve come upstairs" doesn’t connect for me.  I love the simile, but I don’t see how the rooks crawing are similar in any way.  Again, it seems that Mitchell tries to cover his ass by adding "A sort of trance."  This almost but doesn’t fit the previous action and mood.

Or maybe I’m just too picky after coming down from William Gay.