Cloud Atlas
Six nested stories spanning from the 19th-century Pacific to a post-apocalyptic future, each interrupted at its midpoint and resumed in reverse order. Mitchell published it in 2004 and pulled off a formal stunt that most novelists would fumble. Each section is written in a different genre and voice. The argument (that power, predation, and resistance recur across centuries) earns its ambition.
Six pastiches in search of a point. Mitchell mimics genres brilliantly, but the connective tissue is a comet birthmark and a moral (we're all drops in an ocean) the last page states outright. 'Sloosha's Crossin'' makes you read a hundred pages of invented dialect at the book's exact center, and the Timothy Cavendish farce is sitcom material that borrows gravity from its neighbors.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
