The difficulty comes in how Mitchell chooses to construct his novels - or rather, how he does not choose to construct his novels. Mitchell is as good at aphorism (''Faith, the least exclusive club on earth, has the craftiest doorman'') as he is at description (''Now and then goldfish splish and gleam like new pennies dropped in water''). On the contrary, his prose is straightforward and, quite often, magnificent. One does not sense that - unlike, say, William Gaddis, Carole Maso or Walter Abish - Mitchell is trying to chop down the tree of literature in order to replace it with something treelike. Mitchell is neither abstrusely arch nor a wizard of scenic dislocation. This is to the good the tree of literature drops its best fruit after being shaken with conviction and intelligence. Deliberately difficult novels are the only novels he seems to be interested in writing. John Updike's odd (and wonderful) early novel ''The Centaur'' seems to have been written from this impulse, as do Philip Roth's equally bizarre novel ''The Breast,'' Norman Mailer's ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' and Kazuo Ishiguro's ''Unconsoled.'' Among this crowd, the young British novelist David Mitchell stands out. Some novelists just seem to say, What the hell. It is also not an urge unique to modernism or experimentalism. This urge does not necessarily result in novels with nameless characters, mutating typography or unpunctuated attempts to explore the aphotic realm of human consciousness. IT is not unheard of for a novelist of exceptional talent to write a deliberately difficult book.
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