4/15/10

Helen DeWitt – Books that speak directly to the type of person who thinks boredom a fate worse than death

Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff, Your Name Here, Noemi Press, forthcoming)

"Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes:
There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about… writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it’s very unified, and… I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting – I mean, you can take the lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s gonna read it.Last year, Helen DeWitt posted this passage on paperpools, her blog: it ‘says everything I might have wanted to say about life, the universe, postmodernism and Your Name Here.’ Your Name Here is a 120,000-word novel; DeWitt is one of its authors, the category of authorship itself having been split. (At this point, it might have been appropriate to spin off into a footnote about its other author, Ilya Gridneff, an Australian journalist of Russian origin, born in Sydney in 1979 and currently working in Papua New Guinea for the Australian Associated Press, except that the DeWitt/Gridneff partnership doesn’t do much fracturing with footnotes. Epistolary structure and multiple avatars, yes, scans of original documents, including contracts, because ‘without the contractual details any book is just fogbound Jamesian kitsch,’ but not really footnotes: perhaps because, since it’s an authorship made up of two people, the challenge is to discover how, like Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, they might ever be brought together at all.)
In 2000, DeWitt published a first novel called The Last Samurai; it sold a hundred thousand copies in English, was translated into ten languages and turns up on various best-cult-classics lists. But no second novel has been published under her name. Instead, the author has moved from London to New York to Berlin, where she seems to have settled, and from where she has, over the past couple of years, relaunched as DeWitt 2.0, blogger, e-smallholder and co-author of Your Name Here – finished about a year ago but so far without a publisher.
A few months ago, Your Name Here was extracted in the New York journal n+1. To see it was like catching a flicker of the future on one of those move-your-head-and-the-picture-changes bendy cards. It begins ‘up in the air, literally’: travellers on an aeroplane are settling down to read their books. Each is addressed in the narrative as ‘you’ and each has bought a different three-for-two airport paperback – one has Pity the Nation, another has Harry Potter, another has Dan Brown. But the texts keep morphing into Arabic in front of the readers’ eyes:
انجيلينا Angelina
بانانا Banana
تيتكاكا Titicaca‘All the travellers’ books, to their great consternation, are intruded upon by the Arabic language,’ the n+1 editors helpfully point out in a note. ‘A reminder of the supposedly “terroristic” world out there, for which “entertainment” is supposed to be a means of denial and escape.’ Is it a threat, though, or a promise? Mightn’t it be that these alien word-forms are only trying to help?
Straight after the shock of seeing those pages – like the writing on Belshazzar’s wall – I was on Amazon, buying a cheap copy of The Last Samurai. And straight after that, I started following the blog, on which DeWitt posts on such topics as linguistics and transliteration software, irritation with publishers, ‘Arabic verbs of vague application’, how she recently transported all her books to Berlin. There’s also a PayPal button by which you can ‘donate’ $1.15 to her when you buy The Last Samurai second-hand, thus paying the author roughly the same as she would get in royalties from a book sold new. ‘The norm in traditional publishing is for a second-hand book… to bring no financial benefit to the author – the book may have saved the reader from suicide, but there’s no mechanism for the reader to acknowledge the person who made this possible.’ Suicide, pro and contra, is a big theme in The Last Samurai, so this is not as melodramatic a thought as it may appear.
The novel starts in the voice of a woman called Sibylla, a young American living in London who wants to tell us, in a voice that is brainy and prickly but enchantingly funny and clear, the story of her education. Her father, it seems, won a full scholarship to Harvard but let himself be tricked into giving it up; she herself sneaked her way onto a Classics degree at Oxford, only to find herself defeated by the sterility of academic work. She wants to tell us about the job she got after that, and the party she went to, and the awful writer she slept with, mainly to shut him up. She wants to tell us why she likes living in London (something to do with Carling Black Label ads and the way the signs on British fast-food outlets mimic KFC). She’s been reading Schoenberg and wants to tell us about her vision of literature in the future: ‘Perhaps a writer would think of the monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese, and of how this would sound next to lovely long Finnish words all double letters & long vowels in 14 cases.’ Fatally, she finds herself discussing with the terrible writer her dream of an airport-paperback Rosetta Stone: there should be a law obliging publishers to furnish all new books with ‘say, a page of Sophocles or Homer in the original with appropriate marginalia bound into the binding’; it would be a gift to posterity, a second chance for people put off ancient languages at school, something to stow in your carry-on in case you crash on a desert island and find yourself in need of something to
WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING?
But something, or somebody, keeps interrupting her flow.
WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING?It’s her small son, Ludo, the unexpected issue of the sex with the appalling writer, to support whom she now labours day and night, working at home tagging text for the online versions of hobby magazines. She started teaching him to read at two, with flashcards and Dr Seuss (‘I thought that this would be an enormous help to L for very little trouble to myself’); then, when the child starts gobbling through it, moves him on to algebra, Hebrew, French, anything she can pick off her bookshelf that might furnish pester-diversion and buy her a little peace. Then she reads in a newspaper that it is ‘essential’ for ‘the single mother’ to provide a son with ‘male role-models’. What to do? Clearly this cannot be Ludo’s father, whom she despises so much she refuses to reveal his identity, calling him ‘Liberace’ in recognition of his ‘terrible facility’ and ‘terrible sincerity’, his appalling talent for throwing out ‘logical fallacies like tacks behind a getaway car’. As a substitute she gets The Seven Samurai on video, and together mother and son contemplate what is essential to male heroism while practising their Japanese.
Page 195 out of 530 and everything changes. Ludo is six, speaking for himself, and desperate to know the identity of his father. His mother won’t budge, so eventually at 11 he embarks on the search himself, a search defined not by biological parenthood, but by Kurosawa’s – which is to say Ludo’s, which is to say DeWitt’s – ideas about what might constitute the good-enough man. A couple of travel writers are tested; one is easily pleased with himself, the other suicidal. There’s a gambler, a concert pianist, a self-immolating artist, an anthropological linguist, a Nobel Prize-winning astronomer. The world of the novel, previously so narrow and skittery and badly lit – the world of a depressed, frustrated woman stuck to her computer screen – opens out to take in Chad, Central Asia, the Amazon. Brains, courage, integrity, self-discipline: which can and can’t we expect of the samurai these days, and would even these qualities be enough? Where, in our enmeshed age, can the threatened ‘village’ of Kurosawa’s film be said to start and stop? The narrative appears to support quite old-fashionedly heroic answers to this, though the surrounding apparatus floats something more complicated. The dedication is to Ann Cotton, the founder of CamFed, a charity that supports the education of girls in sub-Saharan Africa, as a note explains – so never mind Oxford or Harvard.
To read The Last Samurai for the first time is to experience an odd mix of emotions. With its kanji and its carbon dating, it seems so new and at the same time so ancient. It’s like plunging forward, forward, back, back, back, to swim once more in the warm sea of Ulysses and the Cantos – imagine what Joyce or Pound would do with the internet! Imagine what the internet might have done to them! And yet, that bliss is accompanied by something sadder. As Ludo grows ever more daring, competent, articulate, we watch his mother seem to shrivel, exhausted and emptied, ready to die, she thinks; and the narrative diminishes with her, speeding up and thinning out, faster and faster, thinner and thinner. It’s as if the form of the novel were miming the energy that is being transferred from the mother to the son. Which is to say, while The Last Samurai reads like one of those ambitious, arrogant works of Modernism with designs on becoming a reader’s hotlink to the universal, an open university of the airport bookstalls, a foldaway Rosetta Stone, there is also a sense throughout of limitation, of a losing struggle, with time and/or funds and/ or stamina running out. While no serious artist ever wants gender or class or any other contingency or circumstance adduced as any sort of an excuse for anything, it’s also a fact that The Last Samurai is a novel in which we witness
WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING?
the captivating sibylline voice continually interrupted by that of the demanding little boy, who must have food and heating and clothes and love – not easy when you have no one to support you, replenishing your own supply – and schooling and skateboards and role-models and endless books.
DeWitt was born in 1957, so was in her early forties when The Last Samurai came out. Before that, in the would-be dazzling dizziness of blurbspeak:
Daughter of an American diplomat, Helen DeWitt grew up in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador… She started a degree at Smith College and dropped out twice, the first time to read Proust and Eliot while working as a chambermaid, the second time to take the Oxford entrance exam… In 1988 she started her first novel. Over the next decade she started work on around fifty others.Readers impressed by those ‘around fifty’ novels may be interested to note that she has recently started referring to The Last Samurai as ‘Opus 101’.
In 2003, DeWitt signed a two-book deal with Talk-Miramax in the US. But then Miramax went pear-shaped and DeWitt found herself stranded, under contract but without a champion. The rights for one completed book have only recently reverted to the author; work on the other one collapsed. In 2004, it was reported that the ‘acclaimed author’ had disappeared after sending an email to friends threatening suicide. DeWitt disputes this story: she says there was only one email, to a lawyer, with instructions for the disposal of her body, then one more when she changed her mind. In 2006 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to work on a project she calls ‘Invisibilities’, ‘an attempt to attack … textual and intellectual segregation … accompanied by a website, making possible a more thorough introduction to Arabic and Hebrew texts, to the powerful graphics of the statistical program R, and to other material than is consistent with the formal requirements of a novel’. The beginnings of such a project are among the resources available on helendewitt.com.
Back in 2003, however, when things were beginning to go wrong, DeWitt met Ilya Gridneff in an organic pub in East London: well-read, funny, swashbuckling and drunk as a skunk. A version of what happened next forms the spine of Your Name Here:
Got an email a month later, anarchic, obscene, insanely funny… Gridneff was in London upstaging the BAs formerly known as Y… he was in Cairo chasing Angelina Jolie for the National Enquirer. He was in Berlin chasing Britney Spears for some other rag. He was reading Deleuze, DeLillo, Burroughs, Bukowski, Houellebecq. He used his tabloid money to go off to the Middle East, wandering around Iran in search of pharmaceuticals with a dodgy phrasebook: ‘Give me painkillers, the strongest you have.’ Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Kurdistan, Iraq (not necessarily in that order), Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, the who what where why when remains unjournalistically unclear.It took DeWitt some time to reply, but when she did, the pair of them began an email correspondence. They are not, on the surface, compatible: he is a tabloid fixer and party animal, an imbiber and ingester; she is a solitary intellectual, weaving quietly at her website, batting away unwanted phone-calls, signing her tagline, Ithaca, on her blog. But that, to begin with, was what she liked about him: ‘It was like the world of Fellini, that sordid glamorous world in the rubble of a dead empire, it’s like nothing she knows.’ She wants to help him, this talented young writer, and in helping him, perhaps she is hoping to help herself; ‘I think I’ve discovered the next Hunter Thompson,’ she writes to her publisher – the tone is bigged-up, swaggering, grandiose.
And so, she has her brainwave. They talk a lot about movies, and they both like movies (8½, Charlie Kaufman) in which an apparent impasse is solved by a recursive turn: ‘I love The Sweet Smell of Success. I love Malkovich in Les Liaisons dangereuses. I love Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich; I love Adaptation. Brilliant idea! We could write a book about this! We could write a book about writing a book about this! Bad idea…’ In a way, Your Name Here is simply a scrapbook, attesting to an odd, tense friendship, told through emails, avatars, fictional fragments, with the lack of conventional coherence compensated for by beautiful images, grabbed from the internet, of ‘Felliniesque… sordid glamour’ – Mastroianni and Ekberg, Mastroianni and cigarette, Adorno on YouTube talking about Beckett’s ‘deformed subject’. Gridneff’s avatars have a series of joke-Russian names (Alyosha Pechorin, Alexander Chatsky, Misha Kropotkin), and they all write much the same sort of emails. DeWitt sticks mainly to Rachel Zozanian, the prodigious but damaged author of a surprise bestselling novel called Lotteryland. Lotteryland itself features regularly, a Big-Brother-Blair-type satire in which ‘lucks’ are distributed by Lottomonitor, a cross between a home computer and a junkified I-Ching. And there’s a fictional memoir, of Rachel’s Oxford days in the late 1990s: the undergraduate body, after the abolition of the student grant, is visualised as engaging in a squalid carnival of desperate money-making schemes – phone sex, online poker, scratchcards, working, as Rachel does, as a prostitute in a Black Watch kilt.
The best and funniest ideas in the book involve the duo’s plans for diffusing Arabic throughout the notoriously obdurate medium of English-language culture – putting handy words and phrases, such as ‘Please’, ‘Don’t kill me,’ ‘I am a mother,’ in an Arabic-enhanced edition of The Accidental Tourist. Readers, DeWitt has noticed, will happily expend energy on things with which they feel a fantasy connection – she uses Tolkien as her main example – and so the writer, she decides, must become ‘an alter-Tolkien, creating desire for the languages of the Middle East rather than Middle Earth’, spreading knowledge of real-world languages, peoples, conflicts, instead of narcotising stodge about elves. Imagine a world in which every scholar of Elvish could follow Arabic as well: ‘Whatever events of terror might have been committed in that possible world, it’s unlikely that interrogators in it would be holding people in Guantánamo Bay four years after the event for want of competent Arabists to interrogate them.’ Not for the first time, DeWitt’s pedagogical daydreams lead to questions of fundamental human rights.
Following the example of Omar Sharif, who apparently taught himself bridge between takes because he found film-acting so boring, DeWitt and Gridneff cook up a plan to get A-list stars working through a Hollywood guide to Arabic. You start by learning vowel sounds via Arabic approximations of ‘Nicole’, ‘Tom’, ‘Thurman’, ‘Yoko’,
which enables one to segue smoothly, surely, into a sample verb. Which in turn enables one to segue… to the variations on three-letter core meaning which are the key to the elegance of the language. KiTaaB book, JiHaaD holy war, QiTaaL, struggle; KaaTiB writer, QaaTiL murderer, TaaLiB seeker; muKaTiB reporter, muJaHiD, holy warrior; maKTuuB thing written, letter, maJHuuD, endeavour, maTLuuB, wanted, sought (in classified ads).‘In the world as we know it,’ the authors add, ‘the fact that you can now read more Arabic than 11,967 FBI agents is worrying.’ Indeed.
There are, however, ‘gnats in the Coppertone’, as Your Name Here puts it, and as David Foster Wallace acknowledged in his remarks about splitting text. By choosing not to impose a traditional artificial finish on the ‘reality’ you see around you, you risk giving up on one of the main art-carrots: how the hell can anyone, reader or writer, get through a book without a clear narrative line? And you can stick in an aesthetic-ethical quagmire. How will you know if the incoherence you are rendering is real, valid, accurate, necessary, or a mere artefact of your own ignorance or self-absorption? Throw out, by all means, the phoney warmth and sentimentality – the shellacked mystery, the Vaseline on the lens, of that ‘fogbound Jamesian kitsch’. How can you be sure, though, that what you are left with is not merely charmless and cold?
The Arabic apart, Your Name Here does not have the clarity and exuberance of The Last Samurai. ‘I think this is really part of something larger, the sale of souls,’ Rachel writes in an email to Misha Kropotkin, and she’s right. Although the book may appear, to begin with, to be plotless, it turns out to be tightly organised: a Godard-like enfilade of shaftings, a frontispiece-of-Leviathan-type portrait of the world as a great ‘Biz’ made up of millions of little bizzes, ‘a book-within-a-book-within-a-book-within-a and you… the minimost perestroikist in a nest of Gorbidolls’. I’ve read it three times now, and some of the patterns are clear to me, and there are others I sense but don’t quite get – partly because bits of it don’t work. Gridneff’s emails, for example, cause problems. The communication that starts DeWitt on her quest is written from London, in which ‘the past three days have been wrecked. Drunk karaoke on Thursday night in abject Dalston Chinese restaurant, the prawns, pork rolls, beer and in the style of Tina Turner, me grabbing the mic and singing led zepplin, guns and roses sweet child o mine.’ On he goes on his knock-off bicycle, throwing houmous at a branch of Blockbuster Video ‘for ruining film and colonising cinema’, posting his half-eaten Turkish flatbread into the late-video-return slot. You can see why DeWitt was excited: the writing is delightfully shameless, dishevelled and dissolute; globalised and pornified and digitised somehow, bit after bit after bit. He mails, a little later, from Iraq:
It didn’t start too well at the border… I rushed through a police line nearly causing them to draw weapons – too lazy to shoot and my clown-like shouts of ‘toilet toilet’ and no doubt the extreme look of terror on my face – after local water drunk due to that special kind of forced local kindness led to a rapid digestive process if not immediately dealt with post haste a suicide bowel bomber, think body without organs, would be on their hands… and feet-face etc etc.So yes, DeWitt is right to think that Gridneff gives terrific email – and yet, they’re just emails. The writing is great, but it’s unchecked, unstructured, unsustained. As well as calling him ‘the new Hunter Thompson’, Rachel reminds her ex-publisher that ‘Tom Wolfe’s Kandy-Kolored whatever whatever was basically a stream-of-consciousness letter that Wolfe sent to his editor at Esquire’ (an anecdote that serves mainly to remind one how far away those bogroll-in-the-typewriter days of Beat/Gonzo legend now seem, and how very much one doesn’t want to go back there). Besides which, Thompson had a team of editors dedicated to crafting essay-like forms from his rants and torrents. Would any publisher nowadays bother giving such support to a writer who – unlike, say, the not-entirely-on-a-different-wavelength Russell Brand – has not already been organised as a living logo, down to his very name?
When I stumbled on Your Name Here for sale on DeWitt’s website, I emailed to check that she considered the text published, and so up for review. She replied to me that it was. But she also mentioned dealings with a literary agent who felt that it might yet be sold in a different form, as ‘essentially a postmodern Bell Jar’; citing Barthes, she said that since the text had already been through many versions, she could not see why it should not go through many more. The idea of the text as open to endless revision, never finished but only abandoned, as Auden put it, is not new. What is new is that with web publication, it becomes as easy as a couple of keystrokes to put into practice, opening – as has already become clear with the advent of MySpace and Second Life – unexpected dimensions to the familiar questions of privacy and publicity, concerning intimacy and vulnerability, self-awareness and self-defence. DeWitt and Gridneff are not daft teens posing in their underwear, but there are other ways in which the boundary between personal and public discourse can get disturbingly confused.
DeWitt has many reasons to mistrust publishers. Many writers do. And yet at the same time they know they rely on them, for income if nothing else. It is a relation of mistrust and dependence; of resentment, in other words. Some of Rachel’s sections have the attenuated, brittle feel of not-entirely-worked-through personal pain, and several are a vent against the ‘Biz’ of writing for a living: the crap deals, the loneliness and depression, the slippery publishers and ‘betazoidal’ agents and so on. Most writers think such thoughts, and for valid reasons, but they are not interesting to most readers, for equally valid reasons, and have a way of appearing disproportionate when given shape on a page.
Writers would not so resent publishers if the relationship were only about royalties and advances; but it’s also about deep and terrible emotions, to do with acceptability and rejection and the awful impossibility of ever getting it right. Most writers know the horror of the impending deadline, the jointed mechanical hand reaching out to snatch away one’s poor tender little creature, submitting it to the flaying eye of critical judgment, the swirling knives of the marketplace, the blunted machete of the consensus view. ‘It’s bad, very bad to deal with the biz, but it has to be done,’ as Your Name Here has it; and ‘it has to be done’ because, until very recently, tradition and expediency have deemed the work not in the world until the jointed hand has done its abominable work. Publication is unavoidably painful, and not just because the ‘Biz’ may be cloth-eared and exploitative and dumb. By self-publishing, is DeWitt trying to avoid that excruciation? And what does that avoidance do to the work?
To follow DeWitt’s adventures on her website is to experience blogging as an art-form, arranged sculpturally by the author, but given life only when you, the reader, pick a route. One day fiction might be as elegant and responsive, with maybe audial maybe visual maybe verbal branches, lovely sweeps of information waving and pulsing with the movement of the author’s mind, so close, so direct, so touching, you feel them brush against your cheek. Except that, once you really take that to heart, it’s difficult to see much point in continuing with novels at all, or not as we know them.
Your Name Here is a novel that doesn’t really believe in novels; that is harsh and bleak and weirdly proportioned; that talks about the readers of Anne Tyler and other perfectly decent authors as ‘ostriches’; that dismisses most contemporary fiction. You, on the other hand, are a reader committed to the art of fiction. Do you really need to go to DeWitt’s website and fork out $8 to buy what even a sympathetic reviewer makes sound like a stressful slog?
Writing in this paper about Oblivion, David Foster Wallace’s most recent collection of short stories, Wyatt Mason complained that although he found in it ‘a bright array of sad and moving and funny and fascinating human objects of undeniable, unusual value’, the book exhibits ‘a fundamental rhetorical failure’. You have to work a little at putting stories together from their fragmented state; Mason describes this as making ‘unreasonable demands’ of readers:
Wallace has the right to write a great book that no one can read except people like him. I flatter myself to think that I am one of them, but I haven’t any idea how to convince you that you should be, too; nor, clearly, does Wallace. And it might not be the worst thing in the world, next time out… were he to dig deeper, search longer, and find a more generous way to make his feelings known.
Perhaps because its form is more broken and non-text-based, perhaps because so much of their subject is economic desperation, DeWitt and Gridneff’s work shows up the fallacy in Mason’s argument even more clearly than Wallace’s writing. Generosity has nothing to do with it. Writers only ever get one choice, really, about what they write. Either you give in before you’ve even started and write to some fantasy of ‘the market’, or you go flat out, trying to say something useful about the world as it appears to you. Among the fascinating, touching, tragic, funny or otherwise worthy-of-consideration new ‘human objects’ contained in Your Name Here: the superfluous (wo)man in the age of Wikipedia; celebrities (yet again); global-blackspot tourism, as indulged in by the world’s ambitious and privileged young; security of information, in a world with no shortage of disaffected temporary workers and failed states; the systemic decline in humanities education, down to which books Penguin publishes as cheap classics, since the abolition of the student grant; that weird neurotic fear, post-9/11, in the English-language media, that ‘we’ are being watched and judged and accordingly branded by aliens who conduct their peculiar writing from right to left. And lots of other things – and also, something else.
In her review of The Last Samurai, A. S. Byatt noticed a ‘curious thing’: ‘Though it is the ideas that drive the [novel]… the characters are more human, more simply important to the reader, than in many finely constructed, primarily psychological studies.’ This paradox will be familiar to readers who enjoy complicated Modernist novels: the effort the reader has to put into her engagement transfers itself into a flood of the warmest fellow-feeling for the struggles of the characters – and for the authors, and for the books themselves. You simply don’t feel that way about things that try to be obliging. And so, with art as in life, it seems, the relationships that are the most rewarding turn out to be the ones into which you’ve sunk most work." - Jenny Turner

Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai, Miramax Books, 2000

"Ludo, age six, is a prodigy. His mother, Sibylla, raises him alone and tries hard to keep his voracious intellect satisfied, while she struggles to make ends meet. With her exasperated guidance, he teaches himself Greek, so that he can read The Odyssey, before moving on to study Hebrew, Arabic, Inuit, and Japanese. And both Sibylla and Ludo share a passion for Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which they watch repeatedly, absorbing its lessons of Samurai virtue. Soon Ludo embarks on a quest to find his father, and approaches seven men to test their mettle. Each of them—prominent, powerful, or flawed in his own way—has to rise to a unique challenge.
An intellectual tour-de-force, playful, multi-layered, but wonderfully readable, The Last Samurai is full of stories of remarkable exploits, tables of Japanese grammar, snatches of Greek poetry, passages of Icelandic legend, and ingenious math problems. But it also has a rare emotional depth, as the little boy's search for a father, or even a man heroic enough to be his father, gradually reveals a new and unexpected dimension of love. And at the book's heart is the relationship between Sibylla and Ludo, which is moving and oddly memorable in its fusion of solidarity, frustration, and tenderness."

"The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, her debut novel, is a book quite unlike any other, and in the process of reading it, one learns the basics of ancient Greek and Japanese. It is set in the present day, but within the pages echo the ancient past where the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as other Greek classics, are rediscovered.
The main character is the mother of a child prodigy. She herself is exceptionally intelligent, but due to the lack of a father figure in the family, she is left as the sole provider for the family. So while she works everyday and makes as much money as possible so she and her son can eat and survive, her needs his teaching.
At school he is not use, excelling in every discipline and reaching such a level of completion in set assignments that he affects the rest of the class. There is little choice but to keep him at home and let he mother teach him all she knows. His tools are the great texts, the Iliad, the Metamorphoses, the Odyssey – whatever he can get his hands on. Not only does he read through these texts with a voracious hunger, but he also reads them in their original language.
Even though he knows nothing of other languages at the beginning of the book, he begins at the start with the painstakingly slow operation of learning ancient Greek, learning what the letters represent, what they mean, and how to pronounce them. For help he has his mother, who is well taught in many languages.
They both share a passion for Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, quotes and passages of which are featured throughout the book. When the boy reaches an older age he takes on the proposition to find out who his real father is. Thus begins a long journey, a mirror of the Seven Samurai, where each man the boy seeks is one of the samurai, but each time he is disappointed. The book concludes naturally with the discover of who his father is, after many hopes being shattered.
The layout of this book is very appeasing, with a wide variety of spacing, resulting in a relatively fast read. For anyone who reads The Last Samurai, they will benefit greatly in a multitude of ways, from learning the essentials of basic languages, to discovering the complexities of characters, to learning everyday knowledge that everyone will find useful." - The BookBanter Blog
"Sibylla Newman, a single mother whose 6-year-old son has had no formal education, decides one day to bring the boy to school. The teacher, Miss Thompson, cordially advises the boy to try out some building blocks in the classroom. But the boy wants to talk about his worries that he may not be up to the level of his prospective classmates. ''Have they read Isocrates' Ad Demonicum?'' he wants to know. ''What about the Cyropaedia?'' Miss Thompson says she has never heard of these books, but that her 6-year-old students need not worry about the curriculum, because people have different abilities and interests, and so they read different things. The boy replies, ''Well, I have only read the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek and De Amicitia and Metamorphoses 1-8 in Latin and Moses and the Bullrushes and Joseph and his Manycolored Coat and Jonah and I Samuel in Hebrew and Kalilah wa Dimnah and 31 Arabian Nights in Arabic and just Yaortu la Tortue and Babar and Tintin in French and I have only just started Japanese.'' To place this list on a more teacher-friendly level, the third book from the last would appear to be the French version of ''Yertl the Turtle.'' Miss Thompson points out that children develop at different rates, that what matters is what someone can do with what he knows and that ''one of the most important parts of school is just learning to work as a member of a group.'' The boy, serious rather than arrogant, proceeds to engage her in a debate about John Stuart Mill and then finds her guilty of fallacious reasoning. It is at this point in the conversation that Sibylla returns from having spoken with the head of the school and announces the good news that her son will be able to be enrolled. ''But it looks as though he won't be in your class.'' '' 'What a shame,' '' Miss Thompson ''regretted,'' writes Helen DeWitt, herself any schoolroom pedant's worst nightmare. In an exhilaratingly literate and playful first novel punctuated by divine feats of intellectual gamesmanship, Ms. DeWitt joins Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon in going to the head of this year's class of flamboyantly ambitious novelists whose adventurousness spins out on an epic scale. And like their books - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,White Teeth and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, respectively - her Last Samurai is a sprawling, aggressively showy book with flashes of genius to keep it soaring. It is possible to recognize the hubris here without, like Ms. DeWitt's characters, being able to read that word in Greek or elaborately analyze its derivation. But it's also possible to be utterly delighted by this author's high-risk undertaking and her fresh, electrifying talent. The Last Samurai seemingly centers on the bond between Sibylla and her son, whom she meant to call Hasdrubal or Rabindranath or Fabius Cunctator before deciding that Steve or David might be an easier name for a boy to bear. But it's an exuberantly clever book that can in no way be mistaken for a standard mother-son story. As a linguist and a classicist, among her apparently countless other interests and avocations, Ms. DeWitt uses Kurosawa's Seven Samurai as a means of giving her book a mythic dimension. Because the boy, who wound up being called Ludo, does not know the identity of his father, and because Sibylla refuses to tell him, their obsessive habit of watching and discussing Kurosawa's male-bonding masterpiece becomes central to their lives. It gives the 11-year-old Ludo a model for how to undertake the search in London for father figures, even as it turns Ms. DeWitt's book into a display of what the film scholar Donald Richie has called Kurosawa's predominant theme: ''the education of the hero.'' What this elaborate premise may obscure is that 'The Last Samurai,' in its coolly cerebral way, is so much fun. Anything is possible on Ms. DeWitt's pages, from eye-chart-like typographical escapades to streams of numbers being toyed with by Ludo to learning how the subtitles of ''Seven Samurai'' sanitize its real dialogue. (''What a wonderful language, said Sib, ''they seem to have toned it down quite a bit for the subtitles. I knew 'Japanese Street Slang' was a bargain at $:6.88.'') Along the way, the reader will also learn the Icelandic word for seal meat and the precise way (''heptakaiogdoekontapodal'') to indicate an 87-legged spider, which is a concept Ludo comes up with after he sketches an 88-legged one and imagines that it got into a fight and lost a leg. Ms. DeWitt, an American who seems to have written this book as if her life depended on it and poured vast reserves of inquiring intelligence into the process, saves her most fanciful efforts for presenting potential candidates for the role of Ludo's father. She spins enchantingly surreal stories about the overrated artist, the Nobel laureate, the foreign correspondent and the bogus consul (''When asked why he had impersonated a member of the Belgian diplomatic corps he had replied: Well, someone had to'') on the short list of candidates whom Ludo sequentially discovers. But even as the son looks for a masculine ideal, the question of paternity is settled early on, as Sibylla describes her meeting with a writer whose work is so awful that she feels the need to shield Ludo from it. She went to bed with him mostly to make him stop talking and says his writing is ''like the Percy Faith Orchestra playing 'Satisfaction.' '' One day, Sibylla introduces Ludo to some sentimental, really bad writing and really bad art, then announces: ''You will not be ready to know your father until you can see what's wrong with these things.'' ''When will that be?'' the boy asks. ''I don't know,'' replies his mother. ''Millions of people have gone to the grave admiring them.'' Ms. DeWitt herself, on the other hand, warrants admiration for impeccably good reason." - Janet Maslin
"The Last Samurai is a story of the first years of a precocious child named Ludo and his mother Sibylla, both linguistic geniuses. A single mother, she struggles to provide him with the right stimuli and guidance. The book is brilliant, witty, depressing.
Any book has to find a way to draw us in, and here it starts with: my father was, my mother was, I was glad to get out of my hometown and make it to Oxford – and then I got pregnant from a guy I couldn’t abide. We’re inside a unique story.
"I thought ideally it should be a name which could work whether he was serious and reserved or butch... The problem was that I liked David better than Stephen, and Steve better than Dave, and I couldn’t get round it by calling him Stephen David or David Stephen because a series of two trochees with a v in the middle would sound ridiculous. I couldn’t call him David and Steve for short; that would be quaint." That’s our narrator: wry, cerebral, obsessed with language.
Sibylla stays home to take care of her small son, typing old issues of periodicals into the word processor: Crewelwork Digest, Carpworld, British Home Decorator, etc. Inspired by The Seven Samurai, a film Sibylla has chosen to provide him with some male role models, Ludo begs his mother to teach him Japanese. She evades the issue by giving him a huge reading list to complete beforehand: The Odyssey (in Greek of course), Thousand and One Nights, 10 chapters of Algebra Made Easy, and more. Did I mention that Ludo has now reached the age of 5?
Our narrator’s stream-of-consciousness writing is frequently interrupted by the obnoxious questions of a genius child, demanding explanations to understand the world around him. Though Ludo is phenomenally brilliant, he’s also a normal little boy, with a tendency to get cranky and a need to take naps and so forth. Sibylla’s language skills are amazing (Greek, Hebrew, Japanese), but her 5-year old son’s something else. She needs all of her energy to keep up with him. For instance, Sibylla and Ludo develop a method of taking texts apart: transcribed word, its English meaning, grammatical analysis thereof. Complete passages of the book are constructed this way, in e.g. Greek and Japanese.
Ludo is simply dying to know who his father is, and Sibylla will only tell him "a travel writer." As he picks up on every possible clue to determine who it could be, he takes over the narration of the book. A bridge is built to the Seven Samurai as he seeks out his genetic and surrogate fathers in a series of encounters with men he’s chosen.
In absolutely no way, shape or form does the book resemble a cheerful American how-to book, e.g."How to Handle Your Precocious Child." Our narrator was quite young, unformed, sure only of what she wanted to get away from (her oblivious father and miserable mother; the US; most people she had encountered). She cannot abide logical fallacies and utterances that are not thought through: "He is capable of logical thought. It makes him appear exceptionally intelligent. The fact is that most people are illogical out of habit rather than stupidity; they could probably be rational quite easily if they were properly taught."
The book is not short and it doesn’t move in a straight line. The intellectual excursions into the minds of people confronted with unorthodox dilemmas are diverting and do relate to the larger story – and yet, you have to bear with DeWitt.
An expat by choice, I identify with the narrator: Sibylla and I have a bit of built-in distance to the country where we now live, and we both made more of a step away from what we had than towards something. And then there are the thoughts about language in this book: "It is truly something and something which the something with the something of this something has something and something, so something also this something might something at first something." This is Sibylla working to teach herself German. As a language lover, I was stunned by the linguistic and philosophical excursions." - Nancy Chapple
"This is a difficult, playful novel. Sibylla is the mother of Ludo, a precociously intelligent child. An American expat who fibbed her way into Oxford, Sibylla now lives in London and single motherhood. She has to earn a living, so she works at home typing endless pages of Carpworld. However, having a ferociously intelligent young son in the same room as she works is more than a little distracting. One of the delights of The Last Samurai is the techniques DeWitt uses to place you in the same room as Ludo and Sibylla. Ludo is not introduced as such into the text, he barges his way through like the headstrong and loud toddler that he is. The free style of the text is only natural following the typing of so many copies of Carpworld.
Sibylla is a quite unconventional mother. Despite her love for London, England (the only place in the world that you can buy Alaska Fried Chicken), Sibylla is still very much an alien. She makes an elementary error when she takes Ludo to the local school at the age of six, and discovers that schooling begins at five in Britain. Although she has had friends in the past, to whom she alludes via pseudonyms, her life with Ludo is all time-consuming and isolated. Ludo is the result of a drunken fumble, and Sibylla cannot bring herself to get back in contact with Ludo's father, who's more a frog intellectually than a prince. Thus Ludo is beset by the mystery of his father's identity. To make up for the lack of male role figures in Ludo's life, Sibylla takes to watching Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai with her son repeatedly. Although Ludo gets to learn a lot of Japanese from it, he stills feels a hole in his life and so embarks on a search for his father. Like Oedipus, Ludo has to work out his father's identity by striving to interpret his mother's riddles. But Ludo is only too aware that there is a gulf at the centre of Sibylla's life, for she has tried to kill herself before...
No doubt many readers will be put off by the amount of intellectual activity within this novel. Sibylla is shocked when she reads a school book on Samurai and finds that it's full of errors. Yet Helen DeWitt does make one singular mistake that hasn't been picked up by her editors. On page 29, she refers to the American child prodigy Boris Sidis. However, the child prodigy's father was the famous psychologist "Boris Sidis", and the child prodigy's name was "William James Sidis". This mistake is unfortunate since one of the big themes of the book is child prodigies and hothousing. DeWitt offers the Sidis tale as an example of the horror story for all parents who embark on hothousing: the child prodigy who burns out at an early age. Yet this is the popular view of Sidis as presented by the US press, and does not comprise the whole story. Dan Mahony has done a great deal of research on William James Sidis and discovered that he did a whole load of very important work at the same time that the public viewed him as burnt out. The reason why this work remains largely unknown was because Sidis went to great lengths to hide himself from the unwanted attention of the Press, and published anonymously. One of the downsides of hothousing and self-education is that you can be quite ignorant of some basic things, as Ludo later discovers in the book. Going round in rhomboids on the Circle Line has done nothing for Ludo's knowledge of geography.
There is something balladic about The Last Samurai's structure. What goes around does come around. It is very pleasing to see strands from the earlier part of the novel coming to fruition towards the end. However, one might suspect that Helen DeWitt has cobbled lots of good stories together (her bio on the dustjacket does say that she's worked on loads of novels before this one). It helps her plot that Sibylla went to Oxford, a pivot around which a few of the men in the novel dance. Although she had to fake her way into Oxford, Sibylla does fit in there, as she is rich in cultural capital - perhaps richer than she ought to be, given her motel background. The flitting around from place to place in her childhood would seem to reflect DeWitt's background as the daughter of an American diplomat who had assignments in various Latin American countries. I don't think it's a coincidence that Ludo prefers The Odyssey to The Iliad, with its epic quest for home.
Helen DeWitt certainly lives up to her name. The humour is brilliant and quite vital. I loved Ludo's scenes in school. For the most part, I admired the narration of Ludo very much. The novel does really come alive when we see the world from his point of view for the first time. As there is wit, so there is darkness and poignancy, which seemed to be combined during the scenes where Ludo's father keeps interrupting the boy's consciousness (much as Ludo the toddler kept barging in on Sibylla's typing of Carpworld). I've written a play with themes similar to the Red Devlin sequence, but Helen DeWitt's writing here is sublime. The book could definitely have done with more editing, but overall, there are sections of this novel that are quite perfect." - Kevin Patrick Mahoney

"Most “cult” writers find their disciples only after years of semi-obscurity; Helen DeWitt, who published her first novel The Last Samurai in 2000, found hers in the first sentence of the jacket copy. “Destined to become a cult classic”: thus spoke the oracles of the Talk Miramax/Hyperion marketing department, and subsequent events seemed to bear out their augury. Last summer, in a New York magazine poll, the critic Sven Birkerts called The Last Samurai “The Best Novel You’ve Never Read.” And now the Young Turks at n+1 have gone him one better, devoting 40 pages of their winter issue to an excerpt from DeWitt’s second novel, Your Name Here, “a complicated and important work of art which unjustly has not yet been able to find a publisher in the United States or England” – a “cult” work in the making.
We learn as children, of course, that only the morally obtuse stoop to judging a book by its cover, but in revisiting The Last Samurai – which is indeed complicated, important, and a work of art – it’s worth considering the mixed blessing of all prophecy, and the backhanded compliment implicit in that jacket-copy prediction. Why “cult?” Why not just, “destined to become a classic?” A biographical critic might connect DeWitt’s “cult” status to her uncompromising authorial persona. The word “reclusive” appears three times in the n+1 introduction, which nods approvingly at her expatriatism (she has lived in England and now resides in Germany). Like her literary forebears, DeWitt has embraced cunning, exile, and the writer’s version of silence. Yet she is hardly J. D. Salinger. She keeps a blog called paperpools. For a few dollars, you can download a short story from www.helendewitt.com – in Microsoft Word format, no less. One recent customer even got a nice email from the author. “Reclusive” doesn’t seem to be the right word.
An overhasty reviewer might offer an equally easy and equally unsatisfying answer to the question of “cult”: The Last Samurai’s erudition limits its audience. The story concerns two linguistic prodigies, a mother and a son, and their learning gives the novel its texture. Greek and Japanese characters pepper the page – one imagines a typesetter groaning, head in hands – as do math problems and intertextual allusions ranging from Homer and Ovid to Kinski and (natürlich) Kurosawa. Intellectually, then, DeWitt seems aligned with the post-Ulysses school of anatomic novel-writing, which has produced more than its fair share of “cult” writers: William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace…
Following Joyce, though, the anatomist embeds and signifies his learning in a style of pyrotechnic complexity; his cult status (a sign of high seriousness) is secured not by the range of his references, but by his refusal to translate his shibboleths. DeWitt deploys her erudition quite differently. She doesn’t merely write Greek and Japanese; she teaches them. The patient reader emerges from The Last Samurai able to read a Greek cognate such as ανδρασιν (“men [M. dative plural]”). In this, the novel harkens back to a premodern, rather than to a modernist, tradition. Helen DeWitt has taken quite literally the Horatian injunction to instruct as well as to entertain.
Her prose, too, diverges from the gnomic prolixity of other “cult” writers. This is not to say that she isn’t a stylist, but rather that she seems determined to distance herself from the stylist’s customary repertoire. Linguistic and cultural references may enrich the diction, but DeWitt’s basic unit of composition is the simple, declarative sentence. Take this passage from the prologue, in which Sibylla Newman, the narrator, tells us how she came to be born: “My father was struck speechless with disgust. He left the house without a word. He drove a Chevrolet 1,300 miles.” These sentences are like the logical propositions Wittgenstein describes in the Tractatus. Each corresponds to, and so depicts, a state of affairs. The syntax seems almost reactionary: subject-verb, subject-verb, subject-verb. Keep reading, though, and you discover that simple propositions bend toward the moral and the metaphysical as surely as the dream-tongue of Finnegans Wake:
In later years my father sometimes played a game. He’d meet a man on his way to Mexico and he’d say, Here’s fifty bucks, do me a favor and buy me some lottery tickets, and he’d give the man his card. Say the odds against winning the jackpot were 20 million to 1 and the odds against the man giving my father the winning ticket another 20 million to 1, you couldn’t say my father’s life was ruined because there was a 1 in 400 trillion chance that it wasn’t.With its colloquial repetitions, its undifferentiated dialogue, and its gallows humor, this passage is typical of the novel as a whole, as is the leap from the quotidian “fifty bucks” worth of lottery tickets to the melancholy grandeur of ruined lives – the scale of a number like 400 trillion, ineffable but terribly exact.
Beneath the simple surface of DeWitt’s propositions, then, lurks a vast ambition: an ambition that privileges form over fact and inquiry over knowledge. Like the early Wittgenstein, DeWitt wants to clear away the confusions that arise from the sloppy use of language, and like the later Wittgenstein, she wants to run against the boundaries of language and to gesture at what lies beyond them. The result is a peculiar tension between precision and disorder. That DeWitt sustains it for more than 500 pages is as much an ethical statement as an aesthetic one.
The beginning of the novel proper deposits us in present-day London, in the company of Sibylla, who has dropped her graduate studies at Oxford after an unplanned pregnancy. Her narration of these circumstances never quite reaches the point of conception, both because Sibylla keeps digressing about various historical geniuses and because she keeps being interrupted by her five-year-old son Ludo, himself a
“Why are they fighting?
WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING?
WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING?
Can’t you read what it says?
OF COURSE I can read it but WHY
Well, they’re looking for samurai to defend the village from bandits.”DeWitt presents Ludo’s interruptions just as I have presented them here, unannounced and unexplained, and as they proliferate, The Last Samurai’s early chapters become a bricolage of narration and digression and bits of the books and movies with which Sibylla tries to occupy her son. The effect is both artful and the opposite of artful: it feels like the truth. Apparently, the life of a single mother with a child prodigy is more disorienting than glamorous.
Social facts peek through the gaps between the different narrative registers. Lacking a labor permit, Sibylla works off the books, typing up old issues of magazines like Sportsboat and Waterski International for digitization. At the same time, she attempts to keep an eye on Ludo. They live in a cramped, sporadically heated apartment, and in an economy that privileges utility over talent. They are barely hanging on. Sibylla earns our sympathy by playing this situation for comedy:
I should be typing Advanced Angling as they want it back by the end of the week, but it seems important to preserve my sanity. It would be false economy to forge ahead with typing until maddened to frenzy by an innocent child.It becomes apparent that she herself is a genius, and one might think she’d want to furnish her genius son with the tools to avoid meeting a fate like her own. Instead, Sibylla feels an obligation to protect him from the vulgarity and stupidity of a world that, for example, pays people to retype Advanced Angling. She likens conventionally successful people, such as Ludo’s otherwise unnamed father, to Liberace; against them she sets her personal pantheon of iconoclasts: Glenn Gould, Rilke, Akira Kurosawa.
A running set of epigraphs from Kurosawa makes it clear that Sibylla sees these heroes as latter-day samurai, bound to a code that transcends the philistinism of daily life. She cultivates the code in Ludo, too. After she takes him to a poorly received concert by an avant-garde Japanese pianist, one Kenzo Yamamoto, a quest, of sorts, is inaugurated. Ludo decides to use the scant information his mother has given him to look for his missing father. He will test seven men – the pianist, an artist, two journalists, and two adventurers – to determine their suitability.
The introduction of an old-fashioned plot into The Last Samurai’s principled disorder is jarring. The model, however loose, is The Seven Samurai, in which, we are told a young ronin joins a band of warriors to defend a village against bandits. Ludo is the ronin, obviously. But who are the bandits? And what is the village? More jarring still is a concurrent shift in voice. Halfway through the novel, without warning or ceremony, DeWitt has switched narrators, so that the second half of the book will be Ludo’s. As a structural enactment of the child’s ego-separation from the parent, this is wholly appropriate. However, we hunger for Sibylla’s point-of-view, and as Ludo’s search for his samurai takes him farther and farther from the apartment, we will spend less and less time in her company.
In place of the comforting rhythms of a well-made modernist novel, DeWitt, characteristically, has given us something asymmetric and surprising. We think not of the painter of modern life, imposing form on chaos, but of the bansai artist, whose scissors follow the tree where it wants to go. The form of any novel, of course, tends toward a narrative end, and Sibylla’s digressions and distractions, however captivating, have thus far frustrated our desire for plot. Indeed, Sibylla increasingly sees herself at loose ends, or even a dead one.
Though Ludo’s voice bears a filial resemblance to his mother’s, his world is still full of possibility, and as he explores it, the story accelerates. One of his seven samurai punches him. One slices Ludo with a knife. One, having stared too long into the abyss, thinks of jumping. Each has a story of his own, a nested narrative, and each of these stories is more moving than the last.
More importantly, Ludo offers us a clearer understanding of what we read in the first part of the book. Sibylla, a charming and very literary eccentric, emerges in his eyes as a fully articulated human being – and as a woman whose frustration with the world threatens to destroy her. We recall, for example, that she tried to kill herself before her son was born. “What if a person called the [suicide hotline] and they weren’t very helpful?” Ludo asks one of his samurai.
What if there was a person who thought the world would be a better place if everyone who would enjoy seeing a Tamil syllabary had access to a Tamil syllabary? What if there was a person who kept changing the subject? What if there was a person who never listened to anything anybody said?
He said: Did you have anyone special in mind?
I said I was speaking hypothetically.This is a lie, of course. As Ludo continues, we can hear in his anaphoric fragments the measure of his desperation:
The type of person who thinks boredom a fate worse than death. The type of person who always wants things to be different. The type of person who would rather die than read Sportsboat and Waterski International.He asks his interlocutor to help him save the person of whom he’s been speaking. And in the space of a few sentences, the novel’s resistance to imposing a conventional form on its material starts to look more like a refusal to let the story ripen before its time. All along, the quest of DeWitt’s last samurai has been not to seek out like minds, but to redeem one very particular mind. And note, too, that The Last Samurai can be read as either singular or plural: there may be more than one. Redemption, the calling out from samurai to samurai, seems very much like the project of the novel.
It is difficult to know what to make of DeWitt’s more recent work, which resists even more forcefully received wisdom about what fiction should look like and how it should read. But by turning her back both on the formal strictures of the well-made novel – which, absent their ability to surprise, decay into meaninglessness – and on the stylistic habits of postmodernism, Helen DeWitt has crafted at least one book that speaks directly to “the type of person who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.” It is a small band, no doubt, like the mystery cults of Greece, or the Gnostic Christians, hermetic and even self-involved, but absent the safety of crowds, the ideal reader of The Last Samurai depends on art to make sense of the world. Which is a way of saying that the novel dignifies the term “cult,” and not the other way around." - Garth Risk Hallberg
"Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai is an erudite, silkily written book that is alternately enthralling and stultifying. The book is about an eccentric single mother, Sibylla, whose only child, Ludo, is a genius. Sibylla raises the six-year-old Ludo in the style of John Stuart Mill, flooding him with multiple languages, advanced science, and books well beyond his age. Ludo absorbs them all instantly. But despite his vast intelligence, Ludo begins to feel a pressing need for the simple pleasures of a father; and, basing his quest on Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, with which both he and his mother are obsessed, he embarks on a search for a man to call his dad.
Two things about The Last Samurai stand out immediately. The first is its funky, experimental style. The entire book is written like an internal monologue, with only slightly more structure than a stream-of-consciousness narrative. For a typical example, take this paragraph from p. 364, which I quote verbatim:
Sib was saying All I'm saying is if we imagine setting up a society with no knowledge of the place we are to occupy, we are highly UNLIKELY to sentence ourselves to 16 odd years' absolute economic dependence upon persons of whose rationality there can be no guarantee, and highly LIKELY to stipulate a society in whichYes, the actual paragraph ends on this sudden break; the capital letters are also all sic. The rhythm of DeWitt's narrative voice does become seductive, and there are a few luminous passages that would be unattainable without this free-form style. But, for the most part, I found this just aggravating. Too often, it felt artificial and undisciplined, disconnected from the ultimate purpose of this special voice. I admit that I do place the burden on authors to justify any writing more offbeat than, say, Hemingway's, but I think I'm justified in doing so.
The second notable thing about The Last Samurai is its enormous erudition. DeWitt throws out passages in multiple languages (including Japanese, ancient Greek, and, weirdly, Icelandic), ruminates on advanced physics, and engages in exhaustive analysis of The Seven Samurai. It's all very impressive, and it provides a good simulation of Ludo's curious education. But at times I felt that DeWitt had become enamored with her own learning, with some very long expository passages that, to me, didn't advance the book at all. Admittedly, the individual digressions were quite interesting in their own right, but they distracted from the rest of the story.
What saves this novel from total mediocrity is the surprising power of some of its individual chapters. Ludo's interactions with each father candidate are amusing, terrifying, and sad. The penultimate chapter, involving the fictional adventurer Red Devlin, is an absolute masterpiece.
Also interesting is Ludo's growing awareness of his mother's weirdness. The novel effectively conveys a young boy's innate trust in his mother, and his dawning awareness that perhaps his mother's foibles (which have found such a powerful mirror in him) are more than mere eccentricities. There is a dialogue sequence near the end of the novel where Ludo desperately questions one of his father candidates about a hypothetical woman whom he wishes to help. The hypothetical woman is clearly his mother; and Ludo's simple but penetrating questions are a heartbreaking window into the fears that he has kept bottled in.
Like Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, The Last Samurai's individual components are more compelling than the book as a whole. But whereas The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles was one continuous sequence of stunningly powerful vignettes, The Last Samurai's highs are somewhat fewer and further between. The book makes some important and insightful points about childhood, family, and the emotional emptiness of intellectualism. But there's a lot of blathering in there too." - Steven Wu
"If we lived in a better, more literate society, I would not have to preface this post with the caveat, "This book has nothing whatsoever to do with the execrable Tom Cruise film."
Sometimes I find myself caught in a moment of naive optimism when it comes to these same-title-different-works things. When I saw a poster for 2005's milquetoast Michael Keaton horror film White Noise, my first thought was, "I wonder how they're going to film the Airborne Toxic Event." Looking at the poster again, I wonder what the hell I was thinking. But then again, how would you design a movie poster for a DeLillo novel?
You would think I would have learned, though, after Underworld turned out to be about werewolves or something and not J. Edgar Hoover, B-52 installation art and Bobby Thomson.
At any rate, Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai is, as I've said, not in any way related to Tom Cruise. However, it is in many ways related to Don DeLillo. It shares with his novels many of the traits which have been identified with (and, I think, consolidated around) the aesthetic James Wood notoriously dubbed "hysterical realism."
In DeWitt's novel, information is a pervasive, animating presence, operating inside the novel with a character's force and function—namely, to move the plot along by virtue of its qualities and its quirks. Plot details and characterizations do not defy realism or possibility, but rather dangle off the outer edges of plausibility and persuasiveness. And they do so not in a challenging way, but with an affable degree of condescension; the bounds of realism are not expanded; they are jocularly nudged.
More importantly, density of feeling is avoided—not intensity, which is intermittently present, but density, which is flattened into thinner sheets when it threatens to consolidate. Emotions are displayed as complex in the novel, but they are simplified in the reader; emotional calibrations are meant to be challenges for the characters, but not for the readers.
Geez, I'm ripping on this novel as if I loathed the time I spent reading it. Not true! I enjoyed it a lot, and would unreservedly recommend it. Why? Well, here's the rub: The Last Samurai, and most other hysterical realist novels, are books for people who enjoy enjoying books. This type of novel gives the reader lots to do, and many different types of things to enjoy. It gives the reader exactly what they want—the knowledge that they are enjoying the book as they are reading it. Not the story, not the characters, not the jokes or the emotions or the constitutive ideas or themes of the book, but the book itself—and not the material book, but the idea of the book, the idea of the book as a whole entity, to be enjoyed.
It is puritanical and perhaps a little daft to say that this is a bad thing (although clearly too much of it is a bad thing), but I do not believe Wood is saying that it is a bad thing to have books like this existing in our literary ecosystem. I believe what he has always decried about this type of book is the type of writer it creates—a writer of hysterical fiction. Yes, he's saying that a book like White Teeth is inferior to a book like Moby Dick, but that's not really contested, is it? What Wood's point in critiquing the genre was—and subconsciously, his critics have picked up on it, for this is precisely what enrages them—that Zadie Smith is (or was) less of a writer than she could be because she uses these hysterical realist strategies only when she's evading something in her novel that might be harder and more real, more dense, than she wants to handle in the text. That is not to say that there is nothing hard or real or dense in White Teeth, but that what is any of those things is permitted (and sometimes even wedged) in, while many other of these things which might be there are dropped or sidestepped.
I do not believe there are very many cases of sidestepping in The Last Samurai—mostly because DeWitt is skillful in not requiring very many. The novel and its characters are so competently generated and fitted together that no moment threatens to disturb their smooth working order. The Last Samurai is a tremendous example of what hysterical realism can be about and do, and it is an extraordinary achievement for the author. I say that not because I believe DeWitt to be incapable of doing something other than what she has done, but because it is clearly so incredibly difficult to do what she has done well.
I didn't end up talking about the things I had intended to discuss, so I may post again tomorrow with those thoughts." - www.blographia-literaria.com


 "The state of contemporary fiction seems to be, to me, a buckshot scatter across genre and style: we live in an age where there is no “proper” way to write or even read a text, and no singularly dominant school or method.
The way to read a text is an important thing to consider, for every novel, no matter how straightforward, instructs the reader how to approach it. Such is most certainly the case with Helen DeWitt’s first published novel, The Last Samurai, and more. This is a novel that not only seeks to entertain, but also to educate the reader. It is a novel of ideas, particularly the wonderful, bone-shatteringly beautiful ideas that exist in this world and are available to every single one of us who wants to explore them: languages, music, literature, mathematics, film.
The crux here, though, is that the novel conveys a truly compelling story. And I am honest when I mean compelling: I completed its 530 pages in a single sitting (and memorized the Greek alphabet, available on page 49 of my edition). The Last Samurai initially tells the story of Sibylla, a mother who may just be losing her mind—or perhaps is just too brilliant to be alive—trying to raise a child prodigy alone. The story then shifts to her son Ludo’s attempts to try and discover who his father is and, subsequently, someone who can fulfill that role in his life (or, at least, his conception of what that role should be). To say that the book is based upon Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai would be… well, let’s just say the movie, probably one of the greatest ever made, plays an important role in this book: Ludo goes on to learn the stories of and meet with seven fascinating men who may or may not fulfill his desires—desires which morph and transform as the story progresses.
The Last Samurai is written as a series of journal entries and letters addressed to posterity, so don’t expect a wholly linear plot or quotation marks, for that matter. This novel is funny without being slapstick, sad without being maudlin, and truly beautiful in as many ways I can think, from the simply typography and layout of the page to the content and style of the prose itself. " - S.P. MacIntyre 



Early on, most of The Last Samurai is narrated by Sibylla, an American who had frittered away her days at Oxford: "infiltrating classes on Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, Hittite, Pali, Sanskrit and Dialects of the Yemen (not to mention advanced papyrology and intermediate hieroglyphics)" and, by the summer of 1985, still in her early twenties, has been reduced to taking a secretarial position in London with a publisher specializing in: "dictionaries and non-academic works of scholarship" -- a job that at least permits her to remain in England and avoid returning to the United States. (She really does not want to return to the United States.) A year into the job she has a one-night-fling with a successful writer whom she refers to as 'Liberace', leading to pregnancy and the birth of a son whom she calls Ludovic -- Ludo, for short. (The name on his birth certificate is a different one, and in some circumstances then he is referred to as Stephen.)

Sibylla's narration begins when Ludo is five -- and already proving himself to be quite the child prodigy, quick to learn to read -- soon in language after language. He's already curious about who his father is, but Sibylla won't reveal his identity; eventually, an older Ludo will go on a quest to find his -- or a -- father. In the meantime -- among much else -- a weary Sibylla, looking for male role models and father-figures for the son she is raising by herself, decides: "well, if L needs a role model let him watch Seven Samurai & he will have 8". The Kurosawa film, Seven Samurai, becomes an oft-viewed touchstone and fallback in their lives (as the novel's title -- and its original one, The Seventh Samurai -- already suggest).

Weighing whether to let him watch this film when he is still just five, Sibylla admits: "I think he is probably too young but what can I do ?" It's practically the theme of his childhood: ridiculously precocious, Sibylla struggles to keep the boy busy and can hardly keep him in check, guiding him through languages and reading material, much of which is generally hard to think of as age-appropriate. Of course, Ludo can compare himself to John Stuart Mill -- and is annoyed that he came to, for example, Greek later than the famed philosopher ("he started Greek when he was three. I only started when I was four").

Sibylla manages to put off trying to teach Ludo Japanese for a while by giving him a reading list to get through and other languages to master first, but Ludo is determined and happily takes up the challenge, plowing through the first eight books of Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Odyssey, among other things. As she notes, he is: "a child with no sense of proportion whatsoever".

Sibylla is constrained in her own intellectual pursuits by the need to earn enough to support them, and to take care of the inquisitive boy. For her: "to live the life of the mind is the truest form of happiness", but the demands of life and the responsibilities of single parenthood rarely allow it. On cold days, to save money on heating, she travels with Ludo on the Circle Line -- he's not quite well-enough behaved for them to hole up in the city's museums. Eventually, she tries to enroll the six-year-old in school, but unsurprisingly it proves a poor fit.

Sibylla does her best to indulge Ludo's intellectual pursuits, with DeWitt managing to make both of them seem quite credible as characters and voices, despite the patent absurdity of Ludo's preciosity. So, for example, when Ludo is narrating, he reports:

29 March. Today I finished Kon Tiki. I have decided to learn how to clean a fish.

30 March. Today Sibylla and I practised cleaning a fish. Sibylla was rather annoyed because I did not want to eat it.

This is followed soon later by:

3 April. I was still reading Arabian Sands. It was interesting. The Bedou do not wear shoes. This is to harden their feet. I asked Sibylla if we could clean a chicken today and she said No.

Ludo's learning is, in many ways, simply consumption. There is no critical discernment here -- nor, in most cases, much sense of meaningful understanding. Knowledge here is largely for the sake of knowledge -- one reason, too, for the focus on language-acquisition (although there is also some maths and science).

Sibylla does insist that a certain maturity is required before Ludo can know who his father is: taking the examples of Liberace's music, Lord Leighton's paintings (specifically Greek Girls Playing Ball), and a travel-writer's magazine article she insists:

You will not be ready to know your father until you can see what is wrong with these things.

It is, of course, at first, beyond the boy -- and remains so for quite a while. He is good at accumulating knowledge, but struggles beyond that -- and doesn't know what else he can do:

If she would just tell me who he is I could stop wasting my time on things that might just happen to come in handy and concentrate on the things I actually need to know. I've had to learn five major trade languages and eight nomadic languages just in case. It's insane.

The early part of The Last Samurai is narrated by Sibylla but Ludo becomes the dominant narrative voice -- with the novel also then jumping ahead to when he is eleven and, more independent, he goes on his quest in search of a father, repeatedly venturing out on his own. (Sibylla fades a bit into the background here -- not least in her oversight of the still very young boy.)

There is a significant shift here in this second part of the novel, the emphasis no longer as much on rote- and book-learning. Ludo seeks out several men who he believes could be his father, amusingly gaining access to them in a variety of ways and engaging with them -- testing them, as it were. These are distinct episodes, often more like short stories within the novel, with the men often describing and discussing more of their own lives and thoughts.

The assortment of generally successful and in part brilliant men -- one is a Nobel laureate -- makes for a neat gallery. If the encounters seem, in many ways, even less realistic than the earlier sections of Ludo's great and easy learning, they are nicely used by DeWitt to address a variety of concerns -- of how to live; of what accomplishment and learning is; of parenthood (several of the men have other children, too -- allowing Ludo also to compare how they and he have been raised). There's a variety of drama -- one man is suicidal, and Ludo tries to come up with ways of keeping him from going through with it -- and, ultimately, also a pleasing resolution in the last encounter, with a character from much earlier on reïntroduced, a man true to his art even as he understands how limited the audience for it is.

The Last Samurai is an impressive work -- not least for how much fun it all is. For all the scholarly mentions it wears its learning deceptively lightly -- helped, in part, by Ludo's still very young and literal take on much of what he apprehends and is exposed to. The deeper, complex issues at the heart of the novel are deftly handled -- again, in part, by the directness of much of the presentation (Sibylla -- and occasionally some of the other adults -- speaking to a child), but also in how they are presented as part of the characters' daily struggles, especially Sibylla's.

Much of the activity here is, in actuality, drawn-out and monotone -- Sibylla's typing-work; struggling through texts in foreign languages with dictionary at hand; riding the Circle Line -- but DeWitt's light presentation manages both to convey that without bogging the reader down in wearying description. (A playfulness with even typography -- including text-bits in foreign languages and some number play -- also keep the narrative from becoming too dense.)

The novel does have two distinct parts -- the first basically focused on Sibylla and how she is raising Ludo, the second Ludo's quest tales as he looks for a father -- and the story doesn't entirely satisfactorily bridge them, but each is so strong that it doesn't matter all that much. Sibylla and Ludo are also, for long stretches, very isolated characters, and the extent to which they live apart from the world at large does, at times (and conveniently), tend the novel to thought-experiment rather than real-world fiction, but even this DeWitt mostly gets away with.

The Last Samurai will obviously appeal to bookish readers who like their characters to be learned, and, especially at first, it can seem like just another variation on precocious-child-fiction. But there's considerably more depth to it -- and, as central as learning is to it, DeWitt builds easily upon it, making for a story that is surprisingly accessible and much more widely resonant. Any way you cut it, it's a very, very good -- even exceptional – read. - M.A.Orthofer

https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/popus/dewitth_last_samurai.htm




Helen DeWitt, Some Trick, New Directions, 2019

excerpt


For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most far-reaching dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even in the face of situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared” and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.” In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.”


"DeWitt certainly has some more tricks up her sleeve."― Chicago Review


"Brilliant and inimitable Helen DeWitt: patron saint of anyone in the world who has to deal with the crap of those in power who do a terrible job with their power, and who make those who are under their power utterly miserable."― Sheila Heti, Electric Literature


"I like dry humor with a stick of dynamite strapped to it. The forthcoming collection Some Trick by Helen DeWitt, is probably the most recent example."― Sloane Crosley, New York Times Book Review


"A gem: one of fiction’s greatest minds―dazzling."― Publishers Weekly


"One definition of a genius is that she is so dissatisfied with the way the world is that she compels it to adjust to her, rather than following the usual course of adjusting to it. How do you get a complacent world to stop talking and pay attention? Some Trick suggests that the answer involves stubbornness, oddity, and a great deal of talent."― Adam Kirsch, The Atlantic


"DeWitt's style is brilliantly heartless, and cork-dry."― James Wood, The New Yorker


 “Helen DeWitt will make you laugh until you cry.”—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker


“DeWitt is willing to take her satire as far as it will go, giving us the freedom to read it (or even misread it) as we choose.”—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times Sunday Book Review


“DeWitt is a hot-blooded intellectual, and her contagious passion for the life of the mind can redeem even the bleakest lamentations. . . . In the world of Some Trick, the best words are so acute they lacerate.”—The Nation


In “Climbers,” one of the strongest stories in Helen DeWitt’s new collection Some Trick, a man strikes up a conversation with a woman in the gift shop of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. He has been eyeing her while they looked at the art but has kept his distance, thinking she might prefer to be alone as she contemplates the work of this “crazy guy [ … ] who never sold any paintings.” The gift shop, meanwhile, seemed like a “space designed to ease the transition to the world of men”—and, hence, a good place to try his hand at charming a fellow lover of Dutch Post-Impressionism.

Much of Some Trick’s smartest and best writing concerns this movement from painting to gift shop. DeWitt writes perceptively, hilariously, and often quite poignantly about the tension between making art and marketing art. More than half of the collection’s thirteen stories feature some sort of contractual negotiation. Her cynical portrayals of “hot shot” literary agents are clearly informed by her own frustrating experiences with the publishing industry, including her dismay at the overly aggressive copyediting of her brilliant first novel, The Last Samurai, and her lengthy struggle to find a publisher for her second, the darkly satirical Lightning Rods. In “Climbers,” the central figure is Peter Dijkstra, a Dutch writer who has built a cult following in the U.S. on the strength of some shorter works, though his novels remain untranslated. Some NYC-based writers put him in touch with an agent, with whom Dijkstra reluctantly corresponds, recognizing that “if you want [ … ] words in a notebook to be a solution to credit card debt, there is a bridge that has to be crossed.” After reading a snippet of the writing Dijkstra has done in English, the agent proclaims that he has “the next 2666” on his hands. Meanwhile, the writers who had set out to promote Dijkstra in the first place worry they are helping to “destroy the thing they loved.”

The opening story, “Brutto,” offers a variation on this theme: a painter gets offered £50,000 to design hideous clothing and agrees to take on the project because she needs the money. After the first exhibition, her financial backer tells her, “We have to be more explicit. [ … ] It’s about the body. Hatred of the body.” Maybe, he suggests, “she could get really drunk so they could use the vomit.” The painter thinks: “If you have never been there you think it is easy to walk away.”

Another story, “My Heart Belongs to Bertie,” features a mathematician and writer of children’s books who has trouble getting his agent to understand his intellectual commitments, finding more success communicating with his imaginary friends (who happen to be robots). This story also grapples with questions of probability, another of the collection’s key motifs, with the mathematician censuring the “barbarous” lottery system by which children are assigned, for life, to a single set of parents. In a prefatory note, DeWitt writes of “the gap between people who see why understanding chance matters and people who just don’t get it—people who don’t see why this is crucial to the most basic questions of ethics.” She returns to this topic in a later story, “Stolen Luck,” about a tabloid journalist who displays as little concern for probability as he does for ethics, but still manages to win a lot of money playing poker. (After all, DeWitt reminds us, that’s how probability works: the unlikely outcomes happen sometimes too.)

Readers familiar with DeWitt’s novels will be pleased to find her sardonic wit and verbal virtuosity on display in many of these stories. She comes up with a great way to say that a character sits in a bar doing nothing: “Marc occupies his suit.” She uses the passive voice to comedic effect to describe the indignity of receiving constructive criticism: “Eloise had written a book and been made to have discussions in which the phrase ‘flesh out’ was used of characters.” She provides academic commentary at once erudite and bizarre, as when one polyglot comments: “It’s interesting, everyone knows that Perec’s La disparition is a book in which the letter e does not appear, but Rabbit, Run is never mentioned as a companion piece in which the letter å does not appear. Ångstrom being the correct spelling of the surname of the eponymous protagonist.”

In a collection that returns repeatedly to a handful of favored topics, it is probably inevitable that some treatments of the main subject matters will be more successful than others. Many of Some Trick’s characters feel one-dimensional, and in multiple stories, an improbable turn of events provides neat narrative resolution, a kind of joke that quickly loses effectiveness when over-used. All the same, Some Trick confirms DeWitt’s status as one of the wittiest, most innovative writers working today, someone whose talent for lampooning cliché is matched by the brilliant originality of her best sentences. - Greg Chase

https://harvardreview.org/book-review/some-trick/



Some Trick: Thirteen Stories by Helen DeWitt is itself a bit of a trick. Thirteen being an auspicious number, the reader is obliged to attribute some significance to the volume of narratives in this collection about the strange characters and compromises that make up the worlds of art and publishing. Indeed, DeWitt’s stories are often about probability and her interest in numerical calculations frequently works as a vehicle for exploring analogous aesthetic and literary formulas. These rules, as one might call them, of art and writing may not always be clear, but they can be discerned at least by degrees and DeWitt takes a distinctly formal approach to their unpacking. Fittingly, then, ratios and scarcity, luck and shrewd investing, are at the heart of DeWitt’s stories, whose slantways narratives are never just about one thing. Depending on the reader’s perspective, DeWitt’s greatest trick may either be telling one story 13 times or making 13 disparate stories seem related.

To the readers of this magazine, DeWitt’s characters may seem uncomfortably familiar: artists looking for a break, publishers attempting to re-package the European avant-garde for US market appeal and “geniuses” who may or may not have anything interesting to say when encountered in person. DeWitt’s overarching project in Some Trick is chronicling the trials and tribulations such characters undergo through their various engagements with the fickle world of taste-making. In the resulting vignettes, DeWitt captures many of the cringe-worthy clichés germane to art and publishing milieus—or should I say sectors? spaces? sites? (DeWitt makes one painfully conscious of needless argot!) In response to DeWitt’s canny, though occasionally self-conscious, depictions of creative power struggles and ennui, the reader feels a mixture of bemusement and implication.

A trick may be social or cultural, but in Some Trick, DeWitt is chiefly engaged with rhetorical ramifications. Each of her tales is about the conflict between what one wants or hopes to make and the strangeness of watching that desire being awkwardly communicated. In “Brutto,” a middle-aged artist has a chance encounter with a famous gallerist who asks her to recreate what he calls a “‘monstrosity,’”a “sullen mustard wool [suit with] psychotic stitching” that the artist had made during a dressmaking apprenticeship in youth. The artist hesitates to sideline her painting career, but ultimately feels obliged to make the concessions that Adalberto, the gallerist, requires in order to elevate her career. Fame, the presumed goal of the practising artist, is a trick Adalberto knows how to master. Under his wing, the artist recognizes what is needed to successfully play the games of art awards, prizes and international attention. Considering textile options on a lavish buying trip, the artist reflects: “If you set out to make something ugly it is like setting out to make something beautiful, you will just end up with kitsch.” DeWitt describes the artist’s subsequent realization that to make the new suit approximate the original, “she had to pretend she was just making some suits the way they used to.” To pull off Adalberto’s scheme, the artist has to pretend not to understand it—herein lies the trick!

DeWitt skewers the ways in which artistic potential comes up against financial and cultural realities informed by bureaucratic incentives, commercial market demands and curious notions of public impact and accessibility. DeWitt’s adroit renderings make sense given her firsthand experience of creative recognition as a result of her successful novels, The Last Samurai (2000) and Lightning Rods (2011), and the period of financial challenge that came between them. Her darkly humorous take on the difficult repartees between creatives and their financial and critical interlocutors form a thread that coheres the collection. In “My Heart Belongs to Bertie,” a mathematician who recently published a bestseller struggles to explain to his literary agent why it’s imperative that his upcoming book include complex formulas. In “On the Town,” “dudes who had won at Sundance, who thought funding was solid for their first feature, had suddenly found that the money had dried up because the producers wanted something guaranteed bankable and commercial.” Throughout Some Trick, DeWitt reminds the reader of the impossibility of untangling personal and commercial value. As Gil, a New York publisher trying to woo a punctilious Dutch author into a new book project, reminds us in “Climbers,” there may be mutual awkwardness around the process of collaboration: “The thing is there are people who . . . like hustling, and they’re good at it. . . . . I’d be afraid of losing something that really means a lot to me . . . What if it changed the books for me?”

In anecdotally charting the role of the trick in the linked processes of art making and marketing, DeWitt draws the reader’s attention to how appreciation always exists relative to what the creator can recognize, as well as to what they predict others will recognize. In other words, DeWitt’s stories suggest that success, however defined, is the result of a series of bets and bargains. Whether or not an artwork or book is well received is almost secondary; the point is that its creator has correctly wagered people will care to respond and thereby render a project culturally relevant. “Some trick,” the narrator mutters in the preface, as if responding to a magician who’s just produced an ill-concealed rabbit (no coincidence that the same creature appears on the book’s front and back covers). The fact that the rabbit—here, a trick embodied—was there in the first place is the marvel DeWitt reminds us to grapple with. - Esmé Hogeveen

https://cmagazine.com/articles/helen-dewitt-some-trick-thirteen-stories



Critics were quick to identify the most obvious virtues of Some Trick (New Directions, 2018). Helen DeWitt is funny. She is perhaps the most broadly learned fiction writer working in English today, and folds this knowledge into her work in a way that warmly reminds the reader of the pleasures of learning. In distinction to conventional short stories whose primary achievement is to establish a mood, her stories are actually about something. Rather, they are about a few things, all likely to be resonant with her readers: selfish men and the women they underestimate; trying to get money, and feeling the lack of it; and the difficulty of doing honest, intellectually meaningful work in a world ruled by money and men. That the collection is full of stories that are at once funny, smart, and serious is more than enough reason for a critic to praise it—and for a potential reader to buy it, right now.

The stories so reliably deliver up enjoyment that the first wave of effusive reviews often overlooked a deeper literary game in Some Trick: the collection extends DeWitt’s development (or revival) of forms through which literature can explore ideas—not, in fact, an easy thing to bring off. The common means for working overtly intellectual content into prose fiction are somewhat limited and limiting. Contemporary authors regularly give themselves space to explore ideas by suspending core narrative conventions of realism. But the high modernist and postmodernist canon is filled with works that leave the reader (at least, this reader) with the sour feeling that their main achievement is to flaunt the author’s knowledge, though this may say more about the egos of the authors than the possibilities of postmodernism. For those who abide by the basic expectations of psychological realism, there cannot be much gap between ideas and characters having ideas. This pairing is often clumsy: each season brings a new harvest of favorably noticed but inert novels in which a smart protagonist walks around a big city thinking smart thoughts, or sits at a desk struggling to write while thinking smart thoughts.

DeWitt is regularly characterized as an unconventional author, but she defies conventions with remarkable economy. Critics, for instance, often note the unusual sorts of knowledge that DeWitt introduces into her fiction: quotations in foreign languages, mathematical formulae, or, in “My Heart Belongs to Bertie,” some basic ideas about statistical probability with supporting visualizations and R code. But these matters are not digressions introduced by DeWitt—their presence in her work is a natural outgrowth of her creation of intelligent, curious characters. Further, DeWitt’s stories unfold in relatively orderly worlds recognizably like our own, in approximately chronological order, as conveyed to the reader by trustworthy and unobtrusive narrators. Her work’s formal originality grows almost wholly from a break with two conventions. It does not embrace the tenets, central to post-Flaubertian realism (including much of contemporary American fiction), that fiction should have a carefully established, stable tone, or tell something just the right way once and only once. Her rejection of these norms is emphatic. As Edmond Caldwell noted in Chicago Review, DeWitt’s Lightning Rods, superficially a satire of American business culture, is at a deeper level a biting parody of the editorial and critical expectation that a novel should be neatly structured and uniform in tone, and that an author, having once succeeded with a style or form, ought not to develop any other.

DeWitt has not been satisfied to do something once. She repeats and permutes freely, and it is permutation that affords such a wide scope for developing ideas without reducing fiction to a vehicle for advancing any definite claim. This is apparent, first, across the whole body of work she has published to date. Some Trick explores the same handful of themes as her other works—the novels The Last Samurai, Lightning Rods, and the hard-to-find Your Name Here, as well as other published stories not included in this collection. Her individual books, too, repeat and vary episodes and forms.

In The Last Samurai, DeWitt’s first and best-known work, many things happen over and over. In the first half of the book, its two brilliant principal characters, single mother Sibylla and her son Ludo, ride London’s Circle Line around and around. Sibylla watches Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai again and again on the VCR. Her job—endless in-home transcription of back issues of hobby magazines—is a nightmare of fruitless repetition. In the second half of the book, Ludo, disappointed by the mediocrity of his biological father, sets out to convince more interesting men that he is their long-lost son. He collects a few, with varying, always fascinating outcomes. (I would willingly have read two dozen versions of the story “Ludo Acquires a New Father.”) In its free, graceful engagement with the ideas of the human and natural sciences, The Last Samurai calls to mind the fiction of Enlightenment figures such as Diderot. In form, it recalls a different pre-realist novelistic tradition: it is remarkably like the picaresque, which accumulated narrative episodes ad libitum, and particularly recalls works such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, a deceptively well-plotted work revolving around the title character’s uncertain parentage.

At the conclusion of the novel, Ludo commissions a pianist to make a recording of nothing but variations of a short composition. Some Trick is, like that recording, a catalogue of variations on several themes, most obviously artistic integrity. The unnamed painter in “Brutto” labors over dozens of ugly East German–style dresses after attracting the interest of smooth art world operator Adalberto; before the end of the story she is no longer painting, but collecting jars of her various bodily fluids for a series of prestigious exhibitions. The story warns: “if you have never been there you think it is easy to walk away.” The author Peter (no last name given), cannot persuade the dim-witted agent Jim of the promise of working mathematics into fiction, and strikes out on his own; his guiding light will be Andrew Gelman, a famous (and famously scrupulous) Bayesian statistician. The author Eloise, forever reworking her first novel according to the ever-shifting preferences of agents and editors, disappears from the narrative. The Dutch author Peter Dijkstra, a man with fragile mental health and limited social graces, tries to capitalize on American enthusiasm for his work without being destroyed by the crassly economic form this enthusiasm assumes. The author Jaap Bergsma, a master of self-sabotage, nonetheless gets the “crap-free deal” he so desired for his work. The world-famous pianist Morhange, after nearly a decade in the artistic wilderness, saves himself by taming his ego; Pete the rocker walks away from stardom with no regrets; the drummer Keith O’Connor kills himself. The photographer Plantinga, by her studied avoidance of formal training, winds up with both worldly success and a true education.

Any of these stories, read singly, could be taken as a sort of parable about intellectual virtue, or an allegory of DeWitt’s own experience as a writer. But taken together, they offer no very firm moral about honest work, and vary widely in tone, pace, and outcome. “Brutto” is an incremental descent into a personal inferno, while “On the Town” is a Panglossian whirlwind. Sometimes the artists are right to stick to their principles, sometimes they are not. Very often, chance simply offers something good or ill. The formal approach of theme and variations, above all, allows DeWitt to explore the role of accidents, chance, and probability in life, with the firm implication that thinking seriously about chance will unsettle common modes of moral reasoning, as well as fictional conventions. If things can turn out many ways, there is not one correct way to tell a story, but a plurality of forms, styles, and outcomes, all interesting and mutually enriching.

The formal approach of theme and variations has another happy result: it is one that appears to admit of further development, perhaps indefinitely. DeWitt has long professed her interest in finding ways to integrate probability and statistics, data visualization, and social science into fiction. Some Trick makes modest, engaging moves in this direction, and readers should take care not to be impressed too early: DeWitt certainly has some more tricks up her sleeve. - Ben Merriman

https://www.chicagoreview.org/helen-dewitt-some-trick-thirteen-stories/


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https://www.npr.org/2018/05/29/613148555/some-trick-takes-on-the-life-of-the-delightfully-irritable-mind



Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods, New Directions,

2012

excerpt

From the acclaimed author of The Last Samurai, Lightning Rods is "the most well-executed literary sex comedy" of our time.

Described as “the most well-executed literary sex comedy” of our time by Salon.com, and “a wickedly smart satire that deserves to be a classic” by Bookforum, Helen DeWitt’s Lighting Rods is a novel that will leave you laughing for more. Follow one steady rise to power in corporate America as down-and-out salesman Joe curtails sexual harassment in the office and increases productivity with his mysterious, mind-blowing invention.



Helen DeWitt’s second novel explores Oscar Wilde’s advice: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” Lightning Rods is a modest proposal for dealing with the sexual urges of “high-testosterone performance-oriented individuals” in the workplace. And a hilarious mirror of our culture’s ability to rationalize any kind of behavior, as long as it boosts the bottom line.

Our hero, Joe, is a failed encyclopedia and vacuum-cleaner salesman. His territory is Middle America and then Florida, generic landscapes of 7-Elevens, interchangeable neighborhoods, and office parks. Noting that he wastes too much time on his X-rated fantasies when he should focus on “getting ahead,” he realizes there could be a vast demand for sexual satisfaction on the job—the perfect way to increase morale and productivity. He concocts a “product” that can deliver sex in the office—strictly anonymously—via female temp workers called “lightning rods.” “Bifunctional staff,” as he calls them, are mixed in with regular temps and paid extra, and the entire service is “outsourced.” The contraption that allows the on-site screwing is right out of Joe’s favorite fantasy: A sliding platform passes from the ladies’ bathroom to the men’s “disabled” bathroom cubicle, presenting the naked bottom half of a lady for “use.” No need to worry about messy interoffice relationships: A computer program matches coworkers to ensure no one knows who’s schtupping who.

The book is an extended gag—and a brilliant one—that exposes the vexing reality of straight-guy “results-oriented” corporate culture by exaggerating it ad absurdum. DeWitt, also author of the novel The Last Samurai (2000), takes her outrageous premise and plays it straight. She sustains a pitch-perfect, almost Flaubertian deadpan, deploying clichéd business-speak, self-help-isms, folksy slang, and bland banter to set up a vanilla world where something crazy is happening. Outrageous—literally obscene—behavior is normalized in the name of “productivity.”

Joe is more ingenuous than cynical or calculating. His sincere quest to actualize himself as a salesman adds a layer of poignancy to DeWitt’s skewering of corporate culture. He’s a philosopher of sales who just wants to help his clients: “It’s not for me to make moral judgments. I’m a businessman. I deal with these people as they are, not as they ought to be,” goes his pragmatic refrain throughout the book. He pitches lightning rods as an “innovative system of proactive sexual harassment management.” Indeed, very often the “highest-performing individuals in a company” were “a lawsuit waiting to happen,” agrees Joe’s first client, a CEO named Steve. “A man is bringing in $100 million of business. You leave him open to the danger of momentarily forgetting himself with a little $25,000-a-year secretary.” We’ve come a long way, baby! I know.

DeWitt twits our post-Oprah world, where even predatory types appropriate a “victim” stance when it suits them. Joe is quick to summon PC-style sympathy for the “Grade A assholes” who are so “vulnerable” the company needs to “protect” them from their boorish ways. “It wasn’t their fault,” Joe muses, they’re “socially disadvantaged”: “The way to look at it was, if a guy, through no fault of his own, has not been brought up to treat women with respect, is it fair that his whole career should be put in jeopardy?” Sexual actor-outers might simply be afflicted by a “testosteronal imbalance.”

We’re never told what Steve’s company does, what it’s called, or where it is. We know the characters by their first names only: Even as we learn their quirks and secrets, they remain a bit cartoonish—like “flair” that personalizes the cubicle farm. The workplace here is intentionally generic. DeWitt has written a corporate morality tale, or, more precisely, an amorality tale, about a go-getter’s tool for managing basic “instincts” in the snake pit of sexual-harassment litigation.

As Joe reality-tests lightning rods at Steve’s company and troubleshoots with Rube Goldberg resourcefulness, high jinks ensue. In one scene, the milquetoast head of HR, who was kept out of the loop, steps into the “disabled” and discovers the “installation”:

A panel had slid open in the wall beside him. . . . In the hole revealed by the panel were the soles of two bare feet pointing downward. While he watched, some kind of mechanism must have been operating, because gradually the feet moved out into the room. Bare calves came into view. Bare thighs. Bare—Holy mackerel.

He was looking at the naked lower portion of a woman. . . . He couldn’t see anything above the waist. . . .

This wasn’t some casual sexual liaison among the staff. Someone had had to build this contraption and put a hole in the wall. How many people were involved? What would the shareholders think? Was it even legal?

Joe’s contraption has big payoffs, and not just in the office. Assured of anonymous dorsal access during office hours, ornery “top performers” develop more patience and a renewed appreciation for the upper and frontal portions of a woman. They become better boyfriends. Meanwhile, two savvy lightning rods use the extra pay to put themselves through Harvard Law School, debt free. (Need I even gloss the realism here—that highly paid sex work is indeed the most plausible way a pink-collar employee could afford sky-high Ivy League tuition.)

Like Joe, the rods are looking to get ahead, however they can. Bending over in the “disabled” to get “the full-service 24-hour Revco from the rear” is a compelling metaphor for the day job and the trade-offs people make to make good. “Wouldn’t you do something kind of disgusting for a couple of years to have a chance you wouldn’t otherwise have?” reasons Renée, a perfectionist who later becomes a Supreme Court justice. “You were selling use of your body for short periods of time in exchange for the chance to make the best possible use of your mind.” Taking this idea one step further, she maximizes her time while “on duty” by using it as “the ideal opportunity to read Proust’s masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, in French.” Unflappable Lucille sells herself on the unorthodox but higher-paying gig like this: “It’s a chance to practice not letting things get to you.”

Joe’s service is a metaphor for corporate culture in general. “The whole point of lightning rods was that it was a purely physical transaction, with no social interaction of any kind; that was what enabled it to keep the atmosphere of the office from being poisoned,” he says. Depersonalizing these “transactions” makes them safe for the work environment. “Not letting things get to us” is adaptive. But at what price? Like the lightning rods, the corporation is set up to dodge “personal” accountability for the fuckery—here, literally—that is business as usual but kept “out of sight,” outsourced and/or compartmentalized.

Joe provides a tool to enable this ethical work-around, and he’s a tool himself, a well-meaning Joe who “just wants to be a success.” DeWitt is too shrewd a satirist to make him a villain—or even a dupe—for us to judge. She simply presents him as a businessman adapting to “reality.” And like a comic milking one premise for payoff after payoff, DeWitt delights by mining his plan for a seemingly endless yield of perversity: Anonymous sex between coworkers fosters an atmosphere of “mutual respect.” “The whole point of the arrangement,” explains Joe, “is to avoid giving anyone cause for offense.”

DeWitt uses the “what if?” capacity of the novel to describe Civilization and Its Discontents 2.0: the more “civilized” the workplace, the greater the need for a “release.” A droll device throughout shows Joe taking his cues from critters: To validate his pitch with “expertise,” he makes up scientific research about baboons (“The office is a form of captivity”); to find his wings as a salesman, he learns from the birds (a pelican does not “experiment with a sandpiper lifestyle”); watching a dog take a shame-free dump inspires him to dump the personal baggage from sex. Animals inform Joe’s thought process the way Chauncey Gardiner in Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There filtered the world through gardening (the only thing he knew). Both novels use nature motifs to highlight the way civilization has made us more brutal, or more vegetal, as the case may be.

Far edgier than a simple slam against corporate culture, DeWitt’s satire skewers “decency” and “indecency.” She enlists our complicity as we root for Joe—and the rods—to profit from a scenario that formerly screwed them over for free. In the end, he is successful yet wistful:

A salesman has to face facts; that’s one of the saddest things about the job. Because what you realize is just how many things are the way they are because people could not make a living out of appealing to people’s better nature. . . . You have to deal with people the way they are. Not how they ought to be. That’s what being a successful businessman is all about.

DeWitt’s wickedly smart satire deserves to be a classic. As I was writing this review, I came across critic Walter Kirn’s recent rereading of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 on its fiftieth birthday. Kirn writes: “There are no more Joseph Hellers, no more glorious literary crusaders who can ambush and sack, all alone, immense and intimidating social edifices. That demolition job’s been done, that project is complete.” But DeWitt gives plenty of reason to believe that there’s still ambushing to be done. With Lightning Rods, she has done precisely such a job on corporate culture—and on the perversion of PC “enlightenment” in an age that values productivity über alles. Most important, the book is a hoot. In an endnote, Dewitt gives a nod to Mel Brooks’s The Producers. We can only hope for Lightning Rods: The Musical! soon. With a revolving “disabled” set, of course. - Rhonda Lieberman

https://www.bookforum.com/print/1803/helen-dewitt-s-lightning-rods-is-a-workplace-satire-for-the-age-of-sexual-harassment-8284




IF YOU'RE A TOP producer, and a heterosexual man, the testosterone that gives you your drive may also make you, well, reckless about how you approach female coworkers. Suddenly, your employer is faced with a sexual harassment suit. But Eros the mischief-maker, as Freud called him, isn’t all that hard to distract, at least temporarily. Sexual harassment isn’t the only way to discharge high sexual tension, plus it’s pretty ineffective anyhow, for all concerned. A better way might be through the anonymous, eponymous “lightning rods” of Helen DeWitt’s hilarious novel. Management provides “lightning rods” — anonymous female office workers — to its top male employees as both a reward for their productivity and an efficient way to dissipate the sexual energy that accompanies that productive drive. While straight men finally get to have the quick anonymous bathroom sex they enviously imagine their gay colleagues enjoying, the other female employees in the organization are no longer being sexually harassed, and the gay men are either amused by these antics or use them as cover. Everybody’s happy; that’s the theory at least, the logical outcome of the managerial worldview that treats workers as fungible, interchangeable, essentially anonymous cogs in an organizational machine.

The whole set-up is amusing. If you contract with Lightning Rods, they’ll fit out the shared wall that separates the disabled stalls in the men’s and women’s bathrooms with a sliding panel through which the naked lower half of a female employee will be trolleyed backwards. The man won’t know who she is, but will be able to safely satisfy those productive urges, maybe as many as five or six times a day, from behind. Both participants in this event are guaranteed anonymity because they can’t communicate with each other: the male has access only to the female’s bottom half, and she could be any woman in the organization.

The characters who populate Lightning Rods don’t all think the same things, but they do all think the same way. They also all think about the same two things: sales and sex. Joe remains the protagonist for most of the book, until, as we’ll see, DeWitt shifts her focus a bit toward the end of the book as she did in her first novel The Last Samurai. Joe knows from his own experience and his failures as a former door-to-door salesman (first of encyclopedias and then of vacuum cleaners) that thinking about sex can get in the way of thinking about selling. Just as bad: thinking about selling can get in the way of thinking about sex.

Until he realizes that he can combine these things. After all, selling and sexual fantasizing both involve scenario spinning: here’s a way that this amazing thing could come to be! Joe spends a lot of time trying to come up with plausible ways that his fantasy of sex from behind with a woman leaning through a window or a hole in the wall could come true. Trying to imagine credible situations in which this could happen, he ends up imagining a product he himself could really get behind.

The book, narrated in free indirect style, shows characters telling their story in language they themselves would have used to tell it if they were the kinds of characters who wrote fiction (which they never are: they wouldn’t dream of having anything to do with a novel, let alone one written in free indirect style). This style often becomes, as in Lightning Rods, a friendly parody: one that not only tells the story, but also imitates its characters through the telling.

So the language of Lightning Rods is mainly that of the genuinely optimistic salesman, filled with the italics of salesmen who really care about the product, who really believe in what the product can do for those who buy it. Sustaining that optimism requires a kind of programmatic shallowness. If you’re in sales (this is a formulation repeated every few pages), you have to be pretty much like other people to be able to understand their needs and desires. Everyone’s on a first name basis in Lightning Rods — including Edna and Ethel, the hurricanes that frame the story. This universal shallow-but-real friendliness not only makes selling possible, but a genuine social good too: one that promotes such friendliness and mutual understanding. It’s a particularly American friendliness that highly values tolerance of different perspectives, without much thinking about tolerance as a principle or moral maxim, without thinking about anything very deeply at all. Like Facebook, it substitutes and compensates for the inoffensively cheerful lack of depth it represents and to which it contributes. The book’s first words — “One way of looking at it” — are repeated, in one variation or another, dozens of times, both in the narrative’s free indirect style (“the way he saw it was”; “the way she looked at it was”) and in conversations whose diction is of course the same as the narrative’s (“the way I see it”; “the way I look at it”). This is the kind of conversational gambit that characterizes good, low-pressure salesmanship: amicable offers of plausible perspectives that buyers will find pleasant.

We never hear about how people think about the world in which they find themselves. That’s because they don’t think about the world much at all; they “look” at “it,” the world referred to by that dummy, idiomatic pronoun which is the most low-maintenance of things. “It” could refer to anything at all, really, depending on how you look at it. A few of the characters in Lightning Rods will sometimes have ways that they “think about it,” but always in an internal dialogue with themselves, so that thinking becomes just another route to how to “look at it,” just a way for them to sell the plausibility of an idea — this time to themselves.

Salesmanship is all about acknowledging, about seeing, that there are different ways to look at the world. When you tell other people how you see the world, you can hope to encourage them see it your way. Encouragement becomes the medium of social interaction. Tolerance and friendliness become synonymous, which means that not too much strain is put on tolerance. And the lightning rods — by dissipating sexual tension, turmoil, anxiety, and disgust — contribute to the sense of tolerant friendliness.

DeWitt isn’t contemptuous of that tolerance, which her novel often frames as a social achievement. We see Joe making real moral advances in the course of the narrative. There is progress to his story: “It’s important to remember that there’s more to life than being a success. Sure, if you do something it’s important to give it your best shot. But it’s also important to be a good person.” Though the lightning rods are a literalized commodification of women, these women, just as much as their uni-functional peers in the office have ways of looking at things too. Some even prove themselves to be good salesmen.

There’s a continuum here, not an opposition, between the prefab fantasies all these people in sales offer and the serious business of writing. Salesmen and fictionists alike invent and sell worlds to their audiences, and what happens in this book is that Joe’s struggles to make his fantasies make sense — to extend them in such a way so that by the end of the book the whole world has bought into them. Because he’s got integrity, he needs to find some plausible route to his wildest sexual fantasies, and it belongs to the essence of the Aristotlean demand for a plausible story that most people will agree that it might happen. Since Joe can’t help demanding this plausibility from himself, he has to work out his initial idea, even in the heat of fantasy, in ways that he can sell to himself and others, sell to himself because he knows that he can sell them to others. DeWitt does the same thing, like Joe imagining and solving all sorts of complications which could not all be foreseen at the moment that the lightning rods idea occurs to him, complications that arise from the nature of the idea itself as it is worked out. Joe’s idea of the salesman’s job could just as well be a description of the writer’s:

A salesman has to see people as they are. Most people spend their lives trying to avoid doing that very thing. Most people see what they want to see. But a salesman can’t afford to see people the way he might like them to be. He has to see them the way they actually are. And he also has to see them the way they’d like to be. Because no matter how badly people want something, if they don’t want to be the kind of people who want that kind of thing you’re going to have an uphill battle persuading them to buy it.

A writer has to sell people on a description of what people are like. Do it right, and a whole social system can arise out of a series of inevitable interactions that eventually affiliate and unify the whole fictional world.

DeWitt originally wrote Lightning Rods in the late nineties as an act of salesmanship, a way of trying to sell the more challenging Last Samurai. The idea was to publish this novel and a couple of others and become known and salable enough that someone would take a chance on the more important book. But someone did take a chance on it (Miramax), without her having published any other novel, and, as she puts it, this had the strange and unexpected effect of blocking publication of Lightning Rods until now. It must have looked like too slight a second act after The Last Samurai, like her version, maybe, of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice or Roth’s Great American Novel.

But to be too ready to see any of those works, including DeWitt’s, as unimportant confections would be to undersell them. Lightning Rods, as an allegory of social networking, and despite being manically reminiscent of Saturday Night Live commercial parodies or of Mel Brooks’s The Producers (which DeWitt cites in her brief acknowledgment), sees social networking as finally, a sad substitute for real life. As in The Shop Around the Corner or You’ve Got Mail, Lightning Rods is about having partial, mosaic, pieced-together relations with people. Here various people do not unknowingly correspond with their coworkers, but actually unknowingly have sex with them. They literally can’t communicate: that’s what preserves anonymity.

You could say this novel imagines Assbook rather than Facebook, but the difference isn’t very great. The attenuated, not-too-bad society that Joe manages to establish and (for the first time) to feel fully a part of isn’t a terrible place at all. His innovations, and his upgrades, make life more pleasant. The book ends reasonably happily. Happily enough that we may forget its first words: “One way of looking at it is that it was just an unfortunate by-product of Hurricane Edna.” Why “unfortunate”? We’re never told, but the way I see it, that’s because DeWitt has given a powerful, plausible, right neighborly depiction of the absolute triumph of social networking as the only medium of human interaction. It’s great that Joe’s point of view opens out to the point of view of others, particularly of the strong female characters in the book. But this happens because really they all have the same point of view: friendly tolerance of those who can show or be brought to show friendly tolerance. The triumph of social networking ends up feeling like the triumph of the interaction of cellular automata. Social networking sites treat us like bots, and we willingly become bots in order to interact with each other pleasantly, swiftly, and with no unnecessary friction.

But DeWitt also suggests another possible case: the occasional, spectacular descriptions of a world outside the network, the off-shore world that the network doesn’t reach. Joe takes just the wrong lesson from his genuine visions of this world (which, like the two hurricanes, bookend the novel). He thinks social networking can transcend the alien grandeur of what he sees when he looks out into the ocean. But whatever ameliorations he brings to the world, an unfortunate by-product of those ameliorations is their tremendous cost in human experience. - William Flesch

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/sex-sells-helen-dewitts-lightning-rods/


Helen Dewitt, The English Understand Wool, New Directions, 2022 

 A modern amorality play about a 17-year-old girl, the wilder shores of connoisseurship, and the power of false friends

Maman was exigeante—there is no English word—and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.

Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton (“bad taste” loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?


DeWitt (Some Trick) delivers an explosive rebuke to sensationalistic American publishing in this smart and multilayered story. The precocious 17-year-old narrator, Marguerite, hails from Marrakech, Morocco, where her French mother ensured the servants’ loyalty by paying their salaries through Ramadan plus two weeks additional leave, and who would travel to Scotland for the best tweeds, Ireland for linen, and London and Paris for tailoring. During a trip to Paris, her mother disappears. Marguerite’s choice to foreground details about her mother’s taste and discretion in a memoir she’s writing, for which she has earned a seven-figure advance, confounds her editor, Bethany, whose exploitative or at least tone-deaf feedback and Marguerite’s evenhanded responses alternate with Marguerite’s narration. Bethany wants more “feelings” about how she was “traumatized,” and suggests a ghostwriter; Marguerite replies that it’s “best for me to write what I know,” and their tension generates a thrilling sense of Marguerite’s defiance. The details around the scandal that sparked the book deal, following Marguerite’s mother’s disappearance, come out later, after the reader learns that Marguerite has traveled to New York City to write the book. A showdown with Marguerite and Bethany in a French restaurant is worth the price of admission alone. DeWitt is at the top of her game. - Publishers Weekly


"(A) delicious novella (.....) With an impeccably straight face, Ms. DeWitt renders Marguerite’s prim, refined voice, in the process landing superb satirical shots at the publishing industry and the hypocrisies of the current marketplace for trauma narratives. (...) (A)nother of Ms. DeWitt’s classically understated comic jewels." - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal


"The English Understand Wool is a little gift to DeWitt’s (often ardent) readers and an inviting primer for readers new to her. DeWitt is one of our most ingenious writers, a master of the witty fable, and she pulls off her trick here through marvelous specificity of voice and a plot that hums like German machinery." - Julius Taranto, The Washington Post



The English Understand Wool is Helen DeWitt’s best and funniest book so far – quite a feat given the standards set by the rest of her work. It is a heist story, an ethical treatise, a send-up of media culture, a defence of education and an indelibly memorable character portrait. Its pages are rife with wicked pleasures. It incites and rewards re-reading.

The heroine is a young woman whom the world calls Marguerite. She thinks of herself by a different name, the name she was raised with, which she never tells us. In the novel’s opening pages, she describes a recent trip she took with her “Maman” to buy fabric for a suit, or, rather, a tailleur. (Only in French, Marguerite reflects, can one really respect the importance of clothes.) The pair travelled from Marrakesh to the Outer Hebrides, then on to London, where they remained for six weeks (staying at Claridge’s) while the tailor made the garments. Since no one can be expected to go that long without practising an instrument, they had the television removed from their suite and an electronic piano installed. Even this was a compromise: at home they have “a Pleyel from Paris because one wishes to play the pianoforte on the instrument preferred by Chopin”. Marguerite’s story is immediately destabilizing; her existence sounds like the fantastic confection of someone with no real experience of everyday life. And it is, sort of, but not in ways the reader may initially think.

The precise mechanism of DeWitt’s plot should not be spoiled, but Marguerite’s life, it transpires, is the invention of someone who by most lights had no right to intervene in it at all. That is certainly the opinion of Bethany, the editor vying for the rights to bring Marguerite’s story to the public. Marguerite’s own opinion emerges over the course of the book. As the secrets of her past come to light, the reader begins to see her life both as it looks to an outsider and as she herself has understood it. These perspectives are inverted images of one another, in which the polarities of power and moral agency reverse. Coming to know them simultaneously unsettles, one by one, any easy conclusions about what happened to Marguerite and, by extension, any easy assumptions about the rules that govern what usually happens to children. - Heather Cass White

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-english-understand-wool-helen-dewitt-the-last-samurai-reread-lee-konstantinou-book-review-heather-cass-white/




New Directions is publishing Helen DeWitt’s new novella, “The English Understand Wool,” as part of a series called “Storybook ND,” promising “the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon.” Other authors featured in this series of highbrow pocket books include Clarice Lispector, César Aira and László Krasznahorkai, but even on these 60-odd pages alone, the experiment would be a success.

The arrival of a new book by DeWitt, even one in short pants, is cause enough for celebration. They’re one-of-a-kind, as funny-haha as they are funny-peculiar. And, as she demonstrated with her 2018 short-story collection, “Some Trick,” she’s just as brilliant on smaller canvases.

It seems unkind to spoil the sleight-of-hand pleasures of “The English Understand Wool,” but in brief: Marguerite, a 17-year-old raised in Marrakech and tutored in the ways of high culture and haute couture by a wealthy French mother and distant English father, finds herself abandoned one day at an expensive London hotel. Into her suite, instead of Maman, comes a detective bearing surprising news. Overnight, she becomes a person of international interest, and when she’s offered $2.2 million for the rights to a book about her life, she must figure out how to survive in a treacherous world of editors, agents and lawyers.

“It was quite clear that any ‘biopic’ would inevitably be in mauvais ton,” Marguerite observes, dismissing the idea of her life as a movie with one of her pet phrases (from the French: bad taste; vulgar; ill-bred). “But a book, a text, this is something one can control.”

Or so she thinks.

DeWitt, who has seen the sharp end of publishing, knows otherwise. She’s had much to say about the industry — little of it nice — since her first novel, “The Last Samurai” (2000), was painfully delivered to the world. Though feted at the Frankfurt Book Fair, its publication was hampered by typesetting challenges, accounting errors and legal frustrations. Despairing, DeWitt twice attempted suicide. And while the finished book was well reviewed and has attracted an evangelical fan base, it was long out of print and only reissued in 2016 after a career-suppressing interval. Only one more novel has emerged — the sexual-harassment comedy “Lightning Rods” (2011). “The literary world does quite like the notion of genius,” DeWitt once wrote, “but it has no place for a Picasso.”

With this in mind, it’s tempting to read “Wool” as straight-up satire, focusing as it does on an ingenious but eccentric writer pitched against a philistine publisher. Marguerite’s editor, Bethany, bemused by her focus on Maman’s notions about textiles and the family’s Ramadan travel plans, hopes to coax from her a more sensational account of her childhood, inserting editorial suggestions such as: “If you don’t talk about your feelings there is nothing to engage the reader and keep them turning the pages.” Marguerite, however, sticks to her guns.

In fact, “Wool” is as much a terrific character study as it is a satire, with Marguerite’s quirks driving both plot and comedy. What she sees that Bethany doesn’t is that there are many roads to the truth. Her version of events, however idiosyncratic, is the only way she can explain herself; to tell the story any other way would be “in mauvais ton.” The English may understand wool, as Maman says, but that doesn’t mean they know what to do with velvet or satin. So it is with the material of our heroine’s life: There’s a right way to fashion it, even if at first it seems abstruse.

Marguerite, like many of DeWitt’s characters, operates by her own peculiar logic, and much of the humor derives from seeing it teased out to the nth degree. Here she is dismissing Bethany’s objections to the bottle of Puligny-Montrachet she — a teenager — has managed to order over lunch in a Manhattan restaurant:

“If you tell me this is illegal, well, we are in the realm of speculation. Maybe they respect someone who respects good wine. Maybe they’re tired of people who come and order the cheapest thing on the list, or order whatever they happen to sell by the glass.” Five more withering contingencies follow before she concludes, with cool condescension, “Surely this is not what you wanted to discuss.”

In this respect, Marguerite recalls the great mother-son tag team of “The Last Samurai,” relentlessly subjecting everyday situations to their withering (if absurd) logical scrutiny. Six-year-old Ludo, trying to convince his mother he doesn’t need to go to school: “Let’s take two people about to undergo 10 years of horrible excruciating boredom at school, A dies at the age of 6 from falling out a window and B dies at the age of 6 + n where n is a number less than 10, I think we would all agree that B’s life was not improved by the additional n years.” The self-assured mind trapped in a world it perceives as irrational and moronic is perhaps DeWitt’s great subject.

“The English Understand Wool” is a perfect introduction to the anarchic pleasures of DeWitt’s fiction. Once again, using the obtuse ratiocination of her characters, DeWitt aims at nothing less than expanding readerly consciousness, gesturing toward a world of untapped possibility freed from convention. Why go to school if you’re not going to learn anything? If the law is stupid, flout it! Don’t let the bastards get you down!

DeWitt’s inspired skepticism about the ways of the world stems, one suspects, from her love of languages, as reflected in Marguerite’s insistence on writing in French where only French will do. “If you were immersed in other languages,” DeWitt has written, “the arbitrariness of your own linguistic world would become visible — the authority of its conventions would no longer be uncontested.” As with language, so with thought: Step outside of orthodoxy, free the mind. For that insight alone, keeping up with Helen DeWitt remains an essential, invigorating and wickedly pleasurable way to spend your time. - CHARLES ARROWSMITH

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2022-09-30/the-author-of-a-cult-classic-epic-helen-dewitt-tries-a-novella-on-for-size


The slim novella The English Understand Wool is presented in short chapters, narrated by a seventeen-year-old called Marguerite. As we realize, she is apparently writing some form of memoir, as she also includes the occasional missive from a Bethany, her editor at a large New York publishers, commenting on (or rather, worrying about) this work in progress.

The pages Marguerite is delivering clearly aren't quite what Bethany had in mind; she is particularly disappointed that Marguerite doesn't say much about her feelings. Bethany is big on feelings, maintaining that:

If you don't talk about your feelings there is nothing to engage the reader and keep them turning the pages.

Eventually, when they get together to discuss the book, she insists: "masking your emotions doesn't work for a book, it really doesn't". Apparently already at the get-go she had suggested the best course would be to employ a ghostwriter, and she urges Marguerite to reconsider that:

Talking to someone might be an easier way to let it out, and then you can leave it to someone else to knock the text into shape, you can just get on with your life.

As it turns out, Bethany and her publisher have a lot riding on the project: they paid $2.2 million for the North American rights to the book .....

It's suggested early on already that Marguerite has some sensational story to relate, from recent personal experience. Bethany mentions Marguerite as having been traumatized, and having learned that she'd been: "living a lie", and obviously the publisher wants to cash in big on this. Marguerite, and her book, are, however, clearly not what they expected or hoped for.

Marguerite's writing is crisply dispassionate. She is very conscious of presentation, in life and now also her writing; she's been properly raised and what she feels at one point would seem to apply throughout:

I was conscious, above all, of extreme anxiety not to be guilty of mauvais ton.

Everything must be comme il faut -- yes, including the use of French words where there are no English ones for exactly what she wishes to express. She has been taught that precision matters, and she is very precise -- in her expression and pretty much everything else.

The English Understand Wool begins with Marguerite describing how, not long ago, her mother had bought a bolt of tweed in Scotland and was then preparing to have it tailored in London, where she and Marguerite were spending six weeks. It was part of her mother's annual pilgrimage: the family lived in Marrakech, but she always spent the Ramadan period abroad -- tacking on two weeks, to give the servants back in Morocco time to recover from the holidays before they had to attend to her again.

Marguerite clearly grew up in great luxury; money seems never to have been an object. Her mother had very exacting standards, and her approach to life has clearly been well-drilled into Marguerite -- though that has made for what seems to have been a rather odd and isolated upbringing.

On this most recent London visit, Marguerite had one day gone out for a walk and returned to their hotel -- Claridge's, of course -- only to find a Detective Inspector Braddock in their suite and her mother having disappeared. Braddock's revelations upend her life, as she learns that she has indeed been "living a lie", as Bethany had put it.

While not in immediate financial straits, Marguerite does realize that money will become an issue. Hence the book deal -- the mega-deal arranged by auction by the literary agent she hired.

But, as we've seen from the beginning, Bethany doesn't feel she is getting what her company paid for -- presumably, a juicy, weepy tell-all -- which would seem to put Marguerite in quite the bind. The plucky young lady, so properly raised, is however not quite so easily bound; indeed, while always taking great care to avoid that mauvais ton, she simply does things ... by the book -- and that serves her very, very well.

It makes for a delightful story, an ultra-elegant skewering of the publishing industry at its big-house, sensationalistic-bestseller-seeking worst, taking on (and out) the editors, agents, and lawyers involved with one neat stab.

Marguerite's writing may lack 'feeling', or at least an expression of emotion, but the tone rings beautifully. Her account is dispassionate but not cold; like her -- and, especially, her mother's -- actions, it is all refined elegance. Comme il faut. Meanwhile, increasingly overwrought Bethany provides a humorous contrast -- with the story then also in no small part a vindication of true authorship, of allowing a writer to do as they see fit, rather than heeding the meddling of an editor (who here would be just as happy -- indeed, happier -- having the story being ghostwritten ...). (Author DeWitt (in)famously also had her ... experiences and issues with editors and publishers with her first novel, The Last Samurai, back in the day.)

As other-worldly as Marguerite seems and sounds, in many respects (this girl really did not get your usual upbringing), she proves also astonishingly well-grounded and eminently sensible. Appealingly indulgent, The English Understand Wool then is a lovely piece of work -- slight in the best possible way. It's funny, too, and very satisfying (even if that critical unprofessionalism of Marguerite's counter-parties seems simply too implausible -- though in the publishing industry, you never know; expectations can't be too low ...).

Most enjoyable, and certainly recommended. - M.A.Orthofer

https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/popus/dewitth.htm



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