London Review of Books [Vol. 30 No. 17 · 11 September 2008] 

Move Your Head and the Picture Changes

Jenny Turner

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.)

You can read the rest of the review here.

n+1 Editor's Note [Issue 6]

Eight years ago, the reclusive novelist Helen DeWitt published The Last Samurai. This told the story of a cash-poor young linguist and the education of her intellectually curious young son. The critic Sven Birkerts recently called it, in New York magazine, the most underrated book of the last decade. Still, the book is hardly unappreciated:The Last Samurai was widely praised, translated into other languages, celebrated as a “cult” book, and reached a large audience.

Many readers’ reaction to The Last Samurai focused on the bond between mother and son and the peculiarity of the son’s gifts. These things reflected only part of DeWitt’s purpose and her range. What was more rarely said was that The Last Samurai was also an angry book, about the curse of living with too much curiosity and intelligence in too pinched, prosaic, and conventional a world.

At age 47, DeWitt’s success and frustrations led her to leave the United States again and take up residence in Berlin. She has since written a new novel, Your Name Here, in collaboration with the Australian journalist Ilya Gridneff. It continues the preoccupations of The Last Samurai, and it is an important and complicated work of art which unjustly has not yet been able to find a publisher in the United States or England.

Your Name Here begins with a reclusive novelist, Helen DeWitt, alone in Berlin, who starts to mix into her writing the emails of a globetrotting paparazzo, Ilya Gridneff. It is a Pygmalion story with the sexes reversed. Gridneff is the young writer who sends DeWitt reports from the front lines—of his affairs of the heart, of the media pursuit of Britney Spears, and of Iraq, where he goes to report on the war. The character Helen seems to have found a way to grasp the real world without leaving her writer’s desk: she’ll make a novel of it all, and bring both herself and Ilya back into the world of money and success.

You can read the rest of the n+1 note, and the first chapter of Your Name Here, here.