How do you handle uncertainty?

The moment I finished this novel, I rushed to the Internet to figure out what I had just read. How do you explain the penultimate chapter? Who’s writing? Ghostwritten indeed.

David Mitchell has written book after critically acclaimed book. Since themes and characters from his corpus tend to reoccur in other novels, I decided to start here with his first published work. I was not disappointed.

This book begins like a collection of short stories that grow increasingly weirder. That incorporeal being was the tree talking from the previous chapter? That sort of weird. By the time you get to the end, you’re thinking back over the connections that you’ve seen. That is a major theme in this novel—everything’s connected.

The novel didn’t wrap up as neatly as I had hoped. My Internet sleuthing for certainty came up dry, but perhaps that’s for the best. The uncertainty keeps the plot alive in the mind, as you search for resolution.

Mitchell, David. Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts. E-book ed., Hodder & Stoughton, 1999.