As the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano was spewing plumes of ash into European airspace in April, shuttering airports and stranding millions, the British novelist David Mitchell, a tall, gracious, high-spirited man of 41, was marching me across a long, flat tidal beach near his home in Ireland’s West Cork. Along the way, he told me a story about the perils of humility. “I had a short and rather valuable lesson,” Mitchell said after a morning on the beach, “one of these warnings that the universe gives you on a platter sometimes. I’d done an event in New Zealand at a very large auditorium, hundreds of people, and I was kind of pleased with it; it had gone well. A woman came up to me afterwards, a medievalist at the university there, and she said, ‘Have you heard of the humility topos?’ I said no. She explained that, in the medieval era, humility was seen as a great virtue. The humility topos was used for these abbots — you can think of a good one in Eco’s ‘Name of the Rose’ — who were actually monsters of arrogance, but were always banging on about how humble they were — ‘Just like our lord Jesus Christ. We serve him in humility’ — when they were the least humble people you can find in history. Some even became pope. And the woman looked at me and said, ‘Watch out for the humility topos.’ And then sort of disappeared in a puff of smoke.”
I asked him what he thought the woman was responding to.
“I’m from a time and place,” Mitchell said after some deliberation, “where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you’d get cut down for it by your peers and parents. I’m not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome. So my stage persona is self-effacing. Though it was a little harsh of the woman in New Zealand — and I felt a bit unjustly bruised — I actually was pleased as well. She gave me the idea that you shouldn’t present a persona of cultivated pretensionlessness. False modesty can be worse than arrogance.”
If Mitchell stands accused of unbridled self-effacement — and a week spent in his company provides persuasive evidence to support such a charge — it should also be said that a little arrogance from the man might not be out of place. Since the appearance of his debut novel, “Ghostwritten,” in 1999 — a fifth, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” is being published this week — Mitchell’s writing has been compared with that of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Twain, Sterne, Joyce, Nabokov, Pynchon, Salinger, Chandler, DeLillo, Murakami, William Gibson and Ursula K. LeGuin — a baker’s dozen that begins to suggest both the heights of hyperbole scaled by Mitchell’s admirers and the Hydra-headed nature of his novelistic output. Mitchell’s novels have featured a global and historical sweep unusual for writers of his generation.They are set everywhere from contemporary Japan and London to the 19th-century South Seas to California in the 1970s to dystopic distant futures — sometimes all in the same novel. Though recognizably the work of the same writer, no two Mitchell novels resemble each other in form: each is written as though remaking from scratch what a novel can be — and half of them have been finalists for the Man Booker Prize. And though Mitchell’s books are said to have only a cult following in the U.S. —“cult following” apparently now defined as “400,000 books in print” — they are read in 19 languages and are bestsellers in England, where his latest, released in May, made its debut at No. 1 after just three days in stores. Mitchell’s readership is also uncommonly diverse, comprising “Mitchell Geeks,” who pursue him at readings and with “Lost”-like fanaticism trace and trade the references in his books; hip academics who hold conferences on his work; filmmakers like the Wachowski brothers (who bought the rights to Mitchell’s third novel, “Cloud Atlas”); and, by and by, some of the world’s most lauded writers, among them the Booker Prize winners A. S. Byatt, Kazuo Ishiguro and Hilary Mantel and the American literary lights Michael Chabon and Claire Messud.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/magazine/27mitchell-t.html?th&emc=th
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