You confess that, despite many vivid moments, Your Name Here never really achieves this kind of alchemy; on the contrary, it remains what it is: a quirky but ultimately untransfigured story, which “works” in all the ways you might expect it to without ever moving into the unexpected. For all its feints at experiment, the collaboration that it delivers is safe, like a star student spending graduation night smoking pot with her neighbor. And who are you to criticize this student, whose brilliance you have seen burning off page after page? But as any good reader knows, when it comes to a great novel, brilliance is not enough.
This, from the LARB, is fairly positive, in my view. I don’t think there is so much brilliance in Your Name Here, Helen deWitt’s new collaborative novel co-authored with Ilya Gridneff. According to the New York Times, deWitt herself has reservations.
But to DeWitt, “Your Name Here” doesn’t feel like a triumphant return. After all this time, she can’t tell if it’s a groundbreaking narrative experiment, or a complete mess.
You Name Here, far from being, as Lauren Oyler said, “peerless”, is a failed experiment. That it is based in some clever ideas doesn’t make those ideas suitable for fiction.
The real bad news is this.
As for the countless other unfinished manuscripts, and the voices that spoke to her but were cut off prematurely, DeWitt isn’t sure she can ever recover them.
“I don’t think so,” she said, “after all this time.”
Whether she ever publishes another novel, or another failed novel, won’t change the fact that The Last Samurai is the great novel of our times.
Agree on The Last Samurai, which is extraordinary. Apparently the process of getting the book published was so aggravating that DeWitt considered suicide. It didn't become widely available until New Directions reprinted it in 2016, which means that her first novel was largely inaccessible to the public until she was almost 60.
Have you written elsewhere about the Last Samurai? I remember reading it three or four times in my 20s and thinking it was incredible, but never being able to articulate exactly why.