Review: The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt

Review: The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt

by Rich Horton

Helen DeWitt's first novel was published in 2000, and became something of a sensation, at least in the haut-literary world. I think it sold OK, but for publishing company reasons, it went out of print, and was only republished in 2016 by New Directions. I will confess I had not heard of this book, and I need to thank Naomi Kanakia for bringing it to my attention. It has been named the Best Novel of the 21st Century, which I admit that annoys me, because it was published in the 20th Century, admittedly in its last year. 

And you know what? Maybe it is the best novel of the period 2000-2024! Or, at least it's in the conversation. (I'd offer Piranesi as another candidate.) The Last Samurai is a very funny novel built on a rather desperate, and at time tragic, substrate. It is profoundly clever without sacrificing depth. It's well written, unconventionally punctuated in an effective fashion, constantly readable and engaging, and when it wants to be, profoundly moving.

The novel is told by two characters. Sybilla Newman is an American who came to Oxford for college, gotten her degree and gone on to postgraduate studies, and realized that her research subject is worthless. She needs a job to stay in England -- the thought of return to her family is insupportable -- her father is a motel magnate and her mother a permanently frustrated musician. She manages to get a job at a publishing company, and at a reception for one of their authors she ends up in bed with him, and has a child. And now she's telling us about her efforts to teach her precocious son, who is named Ludovic or Steven or David. Sybilla's experiences with education have convinced her that schools are all terrible, and she is teaching her son in between a job retyping old magazines, and more or less simultaneously watching Kurosawa's classic film Seven Samurai over and over again.

Essentially the book follows Ludo's learning process from the age of 3 or so to about 12. Sybilla's strategy is mostly to teach him languages and let him read anything he wants, and this more or less works except he is always asking questions, which makes it hard for her to do her job. But he is -- or seems to be -- utterly brilliant. By the time he reaches school age he is quite unsuited for conventional instructions and soon drops out ... and then decides he wants to know his father. But Sybilla refuses to tell him anything about the man -- who was a one night stand, after all, and who doesn't know that he has a son. And the rest of the book follows Ludo's search for his father, which morphs after a while to a search for any suitable father. 

But of course that doesn't really say much about the novel. The key is the telling, of course. The voice. Both Sibylla and Ludovic have recognizable and plausible voices. There are typographical tricks, but really not terribly exotic ones. There are many languages, none of which besides English and a tiny amount of French I know -- and that doesn't matter. The day by day events are eccentric to some extent -- constantly riding the Circle Line, sitting in museums to do homework, tracking down potential fathers and spying on them -- but they are also mundane in a sense, and confined to London. There are running jokes -- the chicken places named after a state that is never Kentucky, for example. The depictions of the potential fathers' lives are strange and intriguing -- they are travel writers and crusading journalist, diplomats and avant garde composers, fantasists and honest men. 

What is the novel about? Education, of course. Motherhood and fatherhood. Art. Music. Writing. Marriage. What it is to be a good man, or a bad man. Suicide. Language. Boredom. Seven Samurai. There is art criticism: Sybilla has severe tastes. (Lord Leighton (whose Flaming June graces the cover of one of my books) comes in for a lot of derision, as does the man who got her pregnant, and Seven Samurai imitations like The Magnificent Seven.) It all works -- it's laugh out loud funny at times, wry at times, wrenching at times. It's a novel of and about the 20th Century, that still feels ragingly original, and yet in a curious way, despite its experiments, despite its postmodernity, seems as ambitious and comprehensive as the great Victorian novels.