(2018-06-04) Helen Dewitt Has Your Number

Helen DeWitt Has Your Number. Though she’s famous for her big first novel, “The Last Samurai” (2000), her comedy, committed to serial absurdities, doesn’t always flourish best in long forms. It blooms into riffs and fugitive ideas, rebellious asides and quick conceptual tryouts. She is a master of the paragraph-length flareup.

In her new book of very loosely linked short fiction, “Some Trick: Thirteen Stories” (New Directions), there are passages and pages that had me laughing out loud.

What grounds all DeWitt’s brilliance and game-playing is the way that she dramatizes a certain kind of hyperintelligent rationalism and probes its irregular distribution of blindness and insight.

In DeWitt’s world, the life of the mind is perilously close to the life of madness.

Behind “The Last Samurai,” shadowing it but subtly unmentioned, lies the failed project of John Stuart Mill’s highly rational upbringing. Mill learned Greek at the age of three—he was “properly taught”—but at twenty he doubted if he could go on living. In his “Autobiography,” Mill recounts a spiritual crisis that, he realized, his education had partly precipitated. Mill blamed his unhappiness on long habits of “precocious and premature analysis” that had steadily separated him from “the very culture of the feelings.” Discovering, at last, the salvation of Wordsworth’s poetry, Mill felt himself reconnected to natural beauty, and to “the common feelings and common destiny of human beings.”

The stories in “Some Trick” return often to this artistic drama; in them, painters, writers, and musicians attempt to preserve their genius in the face of a hostile world run by vulgar businessmen, mercantile agents, and idiot fashion designers.

Most of the stories in “Some Trick” play out, as it were, on that bridge. At times this space feels limited, a bit obvious. I prefer my allegory to lurk in deep cover.

Maybe that’s why “Famous Last Words,” the best piece in the collection, and the funniest, has nothing to do with art worlds and the bitter toil of the genius. It is also one of her earliest stories, written, like “Trevor,” in Oxford in 1985. It’s a sharp academic satire.

In 1985, those of us who were just arriving at university had no idea that literary theory, ruddy in its triumph, was actually running a fever, and had probably peaked in power. Paul de Man had died in 1983

DeWitt’s story is a deliciously light arabesque around the most popular and prestigious of these concepts, the Death of the Author.

The narrator is skeptical of the Death of the Author; or, rather, she’s interested in the actual deaths of actual authors.

But what makes the story really funny is that, back at her place, while our narrator is trying to explain all this to her companion, he is intent on something else, and is making his moves on her.

In this effervescent tale, a whole era floods back when X puts his hand on the narrator’s breast and sonorously demands, “What is woman? . . . Is this the mark of woman?” He’s de man. But she’s de wit. Sexual/textual politics, indeed.