On the surface, Mitchell’s prose style derived from the economical newspaper writing he learned at the New York World. But his real heroes were the Joyce of “Dubliners” and the great Russian stylists—Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov. And he was an instinctive avant-gardist. The story of Joe Gould, for instance, appeared in two batches—“Professor Sea Gull” and“Joe Gould’s Secret,” itself a two-part series—and the latter essentially revises all we thought we had learned in the earlier. The whole tells the story of a New England renegade who supposedly spent his life compiling, from overheard conversations, “The Oral History of Our Time.” That book, we learn, never actually existed; all that did was a few antic skits and a set of compulsively rewritten tales of his mother’s death. In this respect, the Oral History was a model for those missed masterpieces of advertised literary ambition. Joe Gould was Truman Capote and Harold Brodkey and all the other American authors whose encyclopedic aspirations shrank, in the way of literary things, to a few obsessive subjects, in a perpetually replayed fable of American writing.