If Helen DeWitt were a man, and perhaps European, I suspect more of you reading this would know who she is. An American diplomatic brat who grew up in various central and south American countries, she spent nine years from the late 1970s at Oxford gaining a PhD in classics. For the last couple of decades she has lived in Berlin. She found success at the turn of the millennium with her debut novel, The Last Samurai, the story of a mother and a polymath child, Ludo, searching for a father. When his biological dad turns out to be a mediocrity, Ludo auditions candidates including a Nobel-winning astrophysicist and an idiosyncratic concert pianist.
“Genius” began AS Byatt’s New Yorker review of The Last Samurai. It’s a word that follows DeWitt around (Byatt was referring to Ludo, but numerous other critics apply it to his creator). She called the novel, “a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form, which has more to offer on every reading but is gripping from the beginning of the first”.
Immediacy such as this is precisely what’s been lacking in DeWitt’s interactions – confrontations is a better word – with the publishing industry. She fought protracted battles over the typesetting of The Last Samurai, and after its initial critical and commercial success the book went out of print when its publisher folded. Despite having been completed before her debut was released, DeWitt’s follow-up, Lightning Rods, didn’t appear until 2011. In the interim she attempted suicide, was admitted to a psychiatric ward, and sold a long and wildly strange digital text via her blog that is only now appearing between paper covers, the novel Your Name Here.
The book is co-authored by the Australian Ilya Gridneff, whom DeWitt met late one night in a Hackney pub then forgot about, only to be entranced by the Hunter S Thompson quality of the emails he later sent. Many of them feature in Your Name Here. Back then Gridneff was a stringer, chasing Britney and Angelina around the world for National Enquirer-type publications before gonzoishly heading to Iraq during the war. His story forms one strand of the book, intertwining with chapters from Lotteryland, a novel by DeWitt’s reclusive, suicidal alter ego Rachel Zozanian. DeWitt herself is present in another, dreaming about doing for Arabic what Tolkien did for Elvish and thus increasing global curiosity in, and perhaps understanding of, the Middle East.
And then there are the sections that address we readers, who are presumed to be growing increasingly frustrated with our airport bookshop purchase (“You’re reading Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt. You’re extremely aggrieved”), a move borrowed from Italo Calvino’s novel of nested novels, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Other touchstones include Tristram Shandy and Fellini’s 8½, all works about the difficulty, artistically speaking, of arriving. Or, less negatively, about artistic process being inseparable from artistic outcome.
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I read Your Name Here as a PDF document, which, as well as being its original format, gave the experience a meta twist when the file (for reasons I lack the technical knowledge to fathom) kept randomly shedding my highlights and notes. In doing so it seemed to be channelling DeWitt’s oft-repeated dissatisfaction with editors. (She’s not entirely opposed; she just doesn’t think most are equal to her writing.)
Back in 2000, Byatt called The Last Samurai “a novel of the internet age, where everyone has access to all grammars, all dictionaries, all information, where math and physics and philosophy and fairy tales hum across the same screen”. Your Name Here takes that atmosphere and lets it run rampant. Radical when it was first written, now the book is a time capsule – right down to its emails’ MSN footers. It’s fascinating, which can be critic-speak for hard work, and it’s fair to say that while I’m glad I read it, I’m also glad I’m no longer reading it. But surrender to the manic energies of this “book-within-a-book-within-a-book-within-a…”, and you can glimpse what used to be the future of the novel.
Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff is published by Dalkey Archive Press (£18.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £17.09. Delivery charges may apply
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Photograph of Helen DeWitt by Aileen Son