The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

For When: You've fallen and you can't get up


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Published: Jun 16, 2010

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David Mitchell has a knack for identifying a beautiful moment. He strews paragraphs of them throughout The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, moments that decant the essence of a dusty colonial square, or a pastoral physic garden, or the panoramic wheeling of a flock of gulls into a page of bracingly clear, high-proof prose.

This is half the skill set that made Mitchell's reputation; the rest comes from his audacity with form. In his early novels, he arranged his prose into complex postmodern puzzles. More recently, he's applied a similar playfulness to genre conventions, in Black Swan Green and now in Thousand Autumns' swashbuckling historicism.

But by stuffing his abundant inventiveness into the very square historical novel, Thousand Autumns demonstrates precisely how far audacity can carry you. Historical romance relies on its ability to transport a reader through emotion or suspense or plot, or even just simple immersion. But Mitchell's book comes in the form of three loose-linked novellas centered on early-19th-century Dutch trade in imperial Japan. Characters disappear for great stretches (even the titular de Zoet stays offstage for the second act), plotlines are muted or discarded, crucial motivations go unexamined, while minor cavils get exhaustively explained.

Mitchell's purpose might be subversive, denying the easy pleasures of romance and plot. But it's telling that his writing gets intoxicating and joyful only when he takes a break from his characters, and gets an empty stage to build up some pretty scenery.

Random House, 496 pp., $26, June 29