BLACK SWAN GREEN

I'm about 98% finished reading David Mitchell's Black Swan Green. Interesting. I don't know, something about Mitchell's work just makes me want to think about it, to dissect it, to write about it, like an over-enthusiastic high school Lit teacher who smoked a fatty in his Prius during lunch break.
I think I most admire his skill, his deftness at writing, his ability to use language to push your brain to think in a certain way. He manages to tell a story with a minimum of actual narration, by showing you the story as if it were an object which can be viewed from many different angles. An ability to turn simple prose into poetry. For example, this brief passage describing a teacher writing on a chalkboard:

"Who can tell me what this word means?"

                       ETHICS

Chalk mist falls in the wakes of words.

Black Swan Green is written in the first person, from the point of view of Jason Taylor, a 13 year-old boy in backwater England in 1982. Each chapter represents one month of the year, so it's not so much one big story as twelve smaller, almost arbitrary stories which, when taken together, suggest something larger. 
What I like best about it is that Mitchell seems to have isolated that singular period in this boy's life when he is actually walking through the door, or series of doors, which lead him out of boyhood and into manhood. But Mitchell avoids the obvious ones; there are no losses of innocence or virginity, or moments of glory on the ball field. He reminds us of the real moments, moments that happen both within us and to us, the things which in the end really forge the child into the adult. Moments like realizing, as we wander further and further away from the constant protection of our parents, that the world is strange and random and that life unfolds in front of us in the most bizarre ways. Finding out that life isn't always fair, but sometimes it is. Coping with being "different" at an age when all you want to do is fit in. Making those first few, seminal, monumental choices, choices which in the end determine the person we become: to Do The Right Thing or not to, or even learning for sure what the Right Thing is. 
Since it's written in the first person, we know nothing more of the world or of these events as they unfold than Jason does. We experience these moments just as he does, and just as we ourselves did when we were at that point in our own lives. 
So, a few more pages to go and I will be done with this book. So far, it looks like Jason is going to turn out alright. You never know, though. the story isn't really over until you've turned the last page, just like real life.