David Mitchell's Number9Dream

As you may have determined by reading some of the quotes i've been posting recently, I recently finished David Mitchell's Number9Dream. When thinking about how to summarize my thoughts about it, I agreed with one of the quotes on the back cover (for probably the first time ever). Entertainment Weekly described it as "Delirious - a grand blur of overwhelming sensation" and it really is a good way of putting it.
Mitchell is such a fantastic writer that even the mundane things that his characters do - working in a 24-hour pizza joint, hanging out in a coffee shop, trying to catch a cockroach - are presented in such detail and with such humor and invention that every little moment really shines. The only problem with this is that while his sentences are consistently excellent, his plots skitter all over the map, jumping times, genres, and styles. When presented in books where the structure of the book is episodic - like Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas - it works brilliantly. Here, not so much. Don't get me wrong, this is an amazing book. But events are so scatter shot, the young protagonist so amorphous, and more then one crazy coincidence, that the randomness combined with the hyperreal prose really does make the book feel like an amazing dream. That's certainly how I read the book - as an entertaining, hallucinatory dream. There are scenes in this book that stand up to anything anyone has ever written, but the book doesn't stand up as a cohesive whole to me. So just look at it as a series of very entertaining set pieces and enjoy the ride.