A Bizarre, Challenging Book More People Should Read

Every year, I set myself a reading challenge. These are sometimes small—read more poetry; read older books—and sometimes quite large. More than a decade ago, I spent an entire year reading nothing but writing in translation, an experience that fundamentally reoriented my literary habits. Part of my annual resolution is to devote each summer to filling in a major blind spot. I finished Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, for example, over three years, cracking open one gray Vintage volume every June.

And one year, my goal was to get my hands on The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt. I had been hearing about the novel for years from writers and critics but could not find a copy. First published in 2000, DeWitt’s debut sold well but fell quickly out of print, stranding it in that curious creative purgatory reserved for the deeply loved but commercially overlooked. It became more legend than literature: People whispered about a mind-expanding book crammed with Greek letters, a coming-of-age tale that would teach its audience about philosophy and film history, then convince any reader that they could speak Japanese.

It intrigued and intimidated me, even as I dug in. I would read a few pages, flip ahead to the foreign alphabets, and close the book again. But when I actually knuckled down to finish the thing, I found myself cackling, and underlining, and speeding through the story of the child-genius Ludo and his mother, Sibylla, who is determined to raise her son on a course of advanced mathematics and Old Norse and repeat viewings of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Why, I wondered, had I waited so long? Why had I let myself be cowed?

Such is the legend of DeWitt, whose formidability precedes her. Now 68, she has spent most of her career creating the kind of fiction many might call “difficult,” and fighting with a publishing industry that is skittish about the commercial risk that her work demands. This fall, she finally published her third novel, Your Name Here, a metafictional, email-mediated collaboration with the journalist Ilya Gridneff—and it makes The Last Samurai look breezy.

Your Name Here spent nearly 20 years in the book version of development hell: DeWitt and Gridneff began working on it during George W. Bush’s second term, after DeWitt was institutionalized following a suicide attempt. For a while, it existed only as a PDF on her website, alongside a suggested-donation link. No publisher would touch it—probably because it is pockmarked with pictures of Theodor Adorno, Google Search results, MSN email signatures, and a complete Arabic alphabet. A series of loosely interpolated, convoluted meta-narratives are plastered like papier-mâché onto the story of a brilliant, suicidal author desperate to write her way out of a profound spiritual and financial funk. According to The New York Times, DeWitt responded to complaints that the book was “hard to follow” by making it even more disorienting.

In October, the independent publisher Deep Vellum finally made it available as a 607-page brick. It is a novel of permanent, persistent becoming, a story whose endings are multiple and essentially arbitrary, and it takes its own seeming unpublishability as a theme, or perhaps a promise. Reading it, you find yourself in the same position as the people writing it: a state of hovering uncertainty that does not dissipate, even on the final page. “What if. What if. What if,” DeWitt writes, about a third of the way in. “What if I have no idea what happens next?”

In other words, Your Name Here is that dirty word in literary circles today: a challenge. If you believe a heap of essays recently written about the phenomenon, difficult books are read performatively or shown off by “brodernists” eager to impress others with their brainy brawn. Meanwhile, actual market pressures lead in the opposite direction. As I have written before, this era of declining literacy and unsteady sales has led publishers to seek out writing that is summarizable, adaptable, and even, sometimes, readable. Perhaps they’re catering to the internet-addled consumer, who may seek out books with simple prose and a straightforward plot.

The narrators of Your Name Here want to capitalize on that preference. The novel tells, among other things, the story of a friendship between Helen DeWitt (at certain points apparently fictionalized as a reclusive, suicidal writer named Rachel Zozanian) and the tabloid journalist Ilya Gridneff. The two meet in a bar, forget about each other, reconnect digitally, and decide to write a novel that will combine DeWitt’s autobiographical and metafictional writings with Gridneff’s emails. The goal, it seems, is to make a bit of quick money, banking on public interest in DeWitt’s/Zozanian’s notoriety and Gridneff’s gonzo, debaucherous exploits. The story of the novel is also the story of the composition of the novel, an intuitive collaboration between wildly different writers. This is a book that contains pages and pages of full emails, including subject lines, signatures, and the addresses of ancient or defunct hosting companies.

Pitching a book as abstruse as Your Name Here as a kind of cash grab is the novel’s wry joke. Yet it speaks sincerely to an obsession of DeWitt’s: She has long been consumed by the question of what contemporary society does and does not value, and both she and her characters have struggled with their bills. In the author’s note for her 2018 story collection, Some Trick, DeWitt includes a link that would allow the reader to buy her a cup of coffee; The Last Samurai’s Sibylla bemoans a world that monetizes everything but the strange, polymathic brilliance displayed by her son; in Your Name Here, DeWitt’s doppelgänger, Zozanian, laments all the hours she must spend working odd jobs to make rent.

Yet the real problem for DeWitt is not money but time: Working takes up hours that might be spent in libraries, browsing online, learning new languages, and reading classic texts, all activities foundational to the acquisition of specialized knowledge. But because such activities have marginal monetary value, and educational institutions no longer provide the resources one might need to pursue such research, breakthroughs in knowledge are never made—and great novels are never written. This state of affairs turns seekers of truth such as Zozanian into “shadows of their possible selves,” permanently prevented from attaining full form.

Your Name Here often indulges in such existential pessimism. There is much talk of “the biz,” or rather bizzes of all types: publishing, tabloid journalism, moviemaking, sex work. Yet the novel’s essential form openly defies the profit-seeking world. So, yes, it includes the story of the writing of a novel called Your Name Here, often over email, which is at moments (in Gridneff’s case) quite tedious. But it also zips among the escapades of Zozanian, a brilliant, cash-strapped Oxford student; chapters from her best-selling novel, Lotteryland; messages from a Hollywood filmmaker who wants to adapt Lotteryland; dispatches from mid-aughts Berlin; the intake form from a Buffalo psychiatric ward; arguments between the co-authors about the subject and shape of the book; and the thoughts of a series of fictional readers who pick up, comment on, and help shape the novel—both the real and fictional versions.

This sounds labyrinthine, but it isn’t, not really. DeWitt has constructed not a maze so much as a garden, where many kinds of writing can thrive side by side. The results can be anarchic, even confusing—I was never entirely clear on the precise relationship between DeWitt and Zozanian, or why the Berlin sections are told from one’s perspective and not the other’s—but they are never simple, blunt, or bland. Like the second-person narrators who pop up to gripe about the book’s use of Arabic or comment on its dissimilarity to the works of Anne Tyler, you will often find yourself wondering, What’s going on? Where is this going? And like them, if you keep reading, you will play a part in making it cohere.

Your Name Here does not treat readers like passive audience members to whom meaning is dictated. It demands work from them, and brazenly risks being misunderstood. This is a welcome development at a time when authors are starting to compete with the ultimate consumer-friendly writing: AI-generated poetry and prose. The text blobs that chatbots produce are becoming more popular, more accessible, and more lifelike—a reader can have a personally customized novel delivered à la carte in minutes. But AI writings are limited by the prompts used to create them and will always reflect the reader-prompter’s existing desires and prejudices, as well as those of the training materials, rather than prodding them to expand. I want my sensibility widened, not pandered to.

Great literature, I would argue, is an active pursuit. It enlists the reader in the act of co-creation and meaning-making. By dramatizing and diversifying its many acts of formation, Your Name Here provides its few but devoted admirers with a surprisingly moving argument for spiky, irregular, even incomplete literature. What emerges is a survival engine—a book that finds its purpose in the collaboration between its co-writers and its readers. That the novel is imperfect, often bewildering, and sometimes a mess is not the point. Its fractured, scattered form, grasping for structure instead of pretending to master it, is an attempt to build a future that will include both author and reader. A simpler book could not do nearly as much.

This is why I try every year to challenge myself. Whatever the limitations of the marketplace, great writing remains as capable as ever of breaking open your sense of the world and your place in it. Reading a novel like Your Name Here, you can come to see that there are no real limits in literature, and fewer in life than you’d expect. And having come to realize that, you might start to wonder along with DeWitt: What if? The real challenge begins.