'Black Swan Green,' by David Mitchell - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times

'Black Swan Green,' by David Mitchell - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times: "Even Mitchell, who takes greater formal and intellectual risks than most of his contemporaries, has said, 'Ideas are well and good, but without characters to hang them on, fiction falls limp.' It's true that you don't care about a book like 'Cloud Atlas' chiefly because it manages to analyze a century and a half of exploitation in societies from Europe to the South Pacific. But as a reader, I don't want to be without the verbal play and inventiveness of the generation that came before Mitchell's. There has got to be a way to write fiction that pays attention to people at the same time that it represents the breadth and complexity of the kinds of societies we live in now."