Is it "global" or...

One aspect that I find particularly puzzling about Ghostwritten is how little I felt the "bigness" of the world. Even though the story took place in several different cities all over the world, I didn't get a sense of vastness. All the cities felt pretty generic. There was nothing that felt particularly foreign or strange, and the reading of the novel felt more like I was reading about characters in different towns instead of all over the world. I am troubled by how they all felt so normal, and particularly British. There were only two main narrators who were actually British, but everyone felt a bit normalized. I understand that that is an aspect of being "globalized," but I wonder what the cost of globalization in novels is if we erase the native cultures of the people we are supposedly representing in the novels. The more I thought about it, the more troubling it became. It felt a bit like whitewashing, and even though Mitchell was portraying Asian characters, the loss of their difference seemed to erase something intrinsic to their representation. It's something to consider anyway.