The main character is a girl named Holly, the good guys are the Horologists, and the bad guys are the Anchorites. Each of the good and bad guys have longer-styled names, as in the shortening of them for convenience purposes comes to "Horologists versus Anchorites."
The Horologists are people who, once they die, spend 50+ days in the afterlife-plane, then take over the body of a dying child between specific ages (think 4 to 11 or something). The child actually dies, but then seems make a miraculous recovery. That's because an Horologist has entered the body to live a whole new lifetime, merging another pre-personality onto their memory banks. The most powerful Horologists are also the oldest.
The Anchorites maintain the same body nearly indefinitely by decanting the life essences of normals, but so much the better if they can decant an Horologists. They're the bad-dudes.
But that's the background story. The foreground story follows Holly and the people (see: men) who love her in various forms over six different sectional breakdowns, with each breakdown covering a different time period. The first: 1984 England. Then: the French Alps, 1991; Iraq in 2004; Hudson Valley 20-teens; New York City 2025; and finally, the post apocalyptic coast of Ireland of 2043.
There are some nifty storytelling items here, and some that even feel a little hackey, or maybe a bit out of place in a post-modern lit book. Like the battle between psychics using their brain lasers and the like. And serious magic.
The Atlantic compares Mitchell favorable to Franzen, Chabon, Egan, Diaz, and Munro, in different terms for each, and while there are parallels to Pynchon---in that he's created a single universe---I think a critic from the New Yorker has summed up a strange conundrum surrounding with Mitchell:
He tells a helluva story, but does he have anything to say?
Also, did you hear about the previously unknown Walt Whitman novel just discovered? They're describing it has "pre-modern Pynchon"... I wrote about it earlier at my pops and Dan's blog.
