THE FROG PRINCE

“There are two kinds of women: those who marry princes and those who marry frogs. The frogs never become princes, but . . . a prince may very well, in the course of an ordinary marriage . . . turn into a frog.” So begins this latest from translator (Neruda, Rilke, the Book of Job, etc.) and novelist Mitchell, whose first fiction was Meetings with the Archangel (1998), a spiritual autobiography in the manner of G.I. Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men. Like Gurdjieff, as might be expected, Mitchell is his own man when it comes to writing a fable like this one, which at first glance might seem YA but quickly becomes worldly-wise, clearly aimed only at anyone who wants to come along as he tells his story in his own self-pleasing way. It takes place after a crack in reality occurs in the 16th century and a certain princess, who resists her feelings for a frog prince, is struck ” . . . deeper down, beneath the level of consciousness, in the dark and fertile soil of her heart, [where] love had planted itself like a mustard seed.” Mustard-seed parables are not a dime a dozen, and Mitchell’s is a miracle of the Now. The reader moves through it with eyes wide upon the concrete and the fantastic at once.