Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff, Your Name Here (2025)

Some years ago I read DeWitt's first novel, The Last Samurai, and like everyone else, I was wowed by it. I also read the unsatisfactory follow-up Lightning Rods (actually written first, thankfully), but there was this sense of, when is she gonna put out another REAL novel? Another humdinger? Well, there was Your Name Here, an unpublished work of which we knew. It was briefly on sale as a PDF from DeWitt's website, but it was taken down I think for legal reasons of some sort, and somehow no one who had bought it was cool enough to leak it onto the internet (quite an indictment, I'd say), so unless you had some sort of in, it remained tantalizingly out of reach.

Anyway, whatever, long story short, now it's finally available. A Dalkey Archive original, as seems appropriate. It's the kind of long, postmodern thing I like, aggressively so: email correspondences, second-person sections, excerpts of texts within the text--all your favorites. If it's about anything, it's about a reclusive writer, Rachel Zozanian, a stand-in for DeWitt, her efforts to get her shit together, as she battles a recalcitrant publishing industry and has correspondences with Grifneff's alter-egos, gonzo journalist epigones. There are lashings of Arabic thrown in, along with more or less irrelevant illustrations and some typeface...stuff. I mean, you probably get the idea, at any rate.

Did I like it? That's the more difficult question! As I said, in theory, I should be <i>all over</i> this kind of thing, which is my kind of thing. On the other hand...I don't know. There are a lot of cultural references here, by which I mean A LOT, to any ol' writer, director, actor, or what have you that DeWitt fancies( it may not be fair to attribute this all to the one writer, but, well, life isn't either). Some you get, some you don't, but you sort of find yourself thinking, is this just for people who want to flatter themselves by getting them? Is there any real...anything behind any of this? What's it all good for? Are we positive that this really has anything going for it other than novelty? I sort of feel like a philistine, because I'm generally a fan of novels people turn up their noses at as pretentious. Oh no, I've become one of them! Maybe. But look, however right I am to have reacted thusly, the fact remains, I finished it a few days ago (it reads quickly, if nothing else), and thinking back on it, I try in vain to think of anything that, like, made me feel an emotion or, really, has stuck with me in any way. I can tell you for certain that I'll never want to reread this, and if I'm being honest, it makes me kind of not want to go back to The Last Samurai in case it's annoying in ways I don't remember or didn't perceive at the time.

A while ago I saw Makoto Shinkae's Your Name, which is quite good. Very heartfelt.  The followup, Weathering with You, is also solid.  His most recent film, Suzume, was maybe a little bit of a fall-off. But ANYWAY, whatever else there is to say, I'm positive that it's a better film than Your Name Here is as a book.