Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff

  You are reading your review of Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff. You wrote this review following a two week pause after closing the final page and trying to process. You didn’t get far. Well, you did. You got through the over 600 page sprawl in what felt like record time. Rarely do you find a book that has such a lively and compelling voice and structure. You have very little idea of what the book is about, of its purpose. Yet, you found it weirdly compelling.

Here’s what you understand:

You are on a plane reading Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff. You’ve been enlisted to adapt this novel into a film and you’re excited but you’re not really sure how to make it happen because Your Name Here is a novel, in part, about you reading it. It’s also a collection of e-mails (real? tbd) between Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff, sometimes using fictional names, talking about their ideas for Your Name Here. Your Name Here is also about a novel Helen Dewitt is writing about a fictional writer, Rachel Zozanian, who is also struggling to write a book and e-mailing an irreverent Hunter S. Thompson type and also trying to get her older novel, Lotteryland, adapted into a film. There are also sections of Lotteryland reproduced in full within the text.

Okay, I’m going to give up the ‘you’ here because it’s going to spiral more than I’m prepared to do here.

A lot of the concepts of the book are fun and thoughtful. The use of second person is a clever device that is offered with some metacommentary (there are different ‘you’s—something I’ve thought about before—general ‘you’s, specific ‘you’s, singular, plural—or in Helen DeWitt’s conception, a European second person). In case it’s unclear, the work is extraordinarily esoteric and erudite. The tone is playful and referential, drawing on the works of authors from Italo Calvino to Tolkien to Theodor Adorno. The filmic references are peppered throughout, too—though the literary allusions landed more with me.

As I’ve sort of referenced already, the plot of the book is a bit sprawling and muddled. What really holds it together (if it’s held together) is a kind of raw energy and irreverent voice. I kept turning the page and turning the page, drawn forward by the language alone. There’s an excellent section in which the book outlines classic literary tropes: Chekhov’s gun, The MacGuffin, Plot Vouchers, and Unexposed Contents. The self-awareness of the book can’t help but make me feel like I’ve missed something. The book is hinting to and/or bludgeoning me that I’ve missed something critical. Towards the end of the book, I get another pang of that absence:

There are people who don’t see the need for a false passport until it’s too late. There are people who don’t see the need for credit cards under a variety of aliases until, again, it’s too late. These are friendless orphans, alone in the world. These are the very people who also see no need for a shell company in the Channel Islands until, once again, it is too late. They may, perhaps, see The Importance of Being Earnest and giggle at the jokes---perhaps they even see it at an early age---but the wisdom of the work is lost on them. (592) 

This passage comes up with less than twenty pages to go and I felt that despair: it’s too late. I’ve been lured in and strung along and now it’s too late for me to escape. It makes me think of that moment in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (oh oops, turns out they are also referenced in the text) when they contemplate how there must have been a moment that they could have said no before their untimely demise. I got that same feeling of mourning; I was swept away not realizing I was being trapped.

The whole book felt like a series of false starts (c.f. The “ultimately unsatisfying” If on a winter’s night a traveler) but before you realize it’s not going anywhere, you can’t escape. There are a number of warnings presented as interludes throughout. After the first twenty pages:

You still don’t know what’s going on. The fat guy is back. You and the girl get out of your seats, the guy wrestles his bulk to the window, you and the girl return to your seats. The girl is reading an adult edition of Harry Potter, not Harry Potter plus leather fetishist lesbian triangles, just same old same old with a marginally less juvenile cover, which means this could not be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. You return to Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt. To your left, the girl murmurs softly: Beckett!
          You glance, startled, to your left; implausible as it may seem to argue that the unspeakable Potter “gets people reading” so that they can ultimately move on to Murphy and Malone Dies, it’s surely infinitely less plausible to imagine a reading trajectory that starts with Waiting for Godot and moves on to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone when the reader is old enough to appreciate it.
[…]
         
What’s going on? Is everyone writing PKD spin-offs these days? Is this something everyone knows about but you, something you would have known if you had taken out a slash-and-burn trial subscription to the New Yorker or Harper’s or the New York Review of Books? If so, you wish you’d known sooner and soberer. You like keeping up with new literary trends, but if everyone’s doing it you’d rather read an example that doesn’t involve revisiting Calvino’s ultimately unsatisfactory If on a winter’s night a traveler (24)

After 275 pages:

“You’re reading Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt. You’re extremely aggrieved. Instead of the wealth of stories you loved in the last book there are narrative strands which you find hard to follow. Also, you’ve always admired Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, a real tour-de-force with 11 first chapters of novels in a wide range of genres. DeWitt just keeps bringing in new chapters of the same book within a book; a writer who is clearly no match for Calvino for sheer inventiveness has no business casting aspersions on Our Man in San Remo. Meanwhile Lotteryland is the only part of the book that makes you wonder what happens next, you get involved in the story only to be thrown back into the surrounding narrative chaos. You find yourself hoping yet another flimsy pretext will be found to introduce yet another totally superfluous second-person narrator, an anonymous reader, nothing too fancy, who becomes engrossed in Lotteryland, by the recluse Zozanian” (275).

After 475 pages:

You’re on page 475 and you still have no idea what’s going on. Zozanian has embarked on a book with your character, so now we have a book-within-a-book-within-a-book-within-a and you seem to be the minimost perestroikist in a nest of Gorbidolls. A cast of extraneous characters seems to be multiplying like rabbits. Rabbits in a Viagra trial. Rabbits in a Viagra trial designed to tackle the freak four-hour erection problem. Who are these people? What are they doing here? It’s like the finale of Blazing fucking Saddles. (475)

What I can say is that, probably more than any other book, Your Name Here is consistently aware of its audience. DeWitt and Gridneff know exactly what you’re thinking and pre-empt you at every turn. It’s pretty incredible that they can anticipate and craft your journey like that.

Of course, the book is a blend of styles. It’s equal parts literary and irreverent. That, too, is reflected on. The fictional author Rachel Zozanian comments on her desire to “write something clinical and cold, like manet’s olympia. she wants to place manet’s olympia next to aristide bruant dans son cabaret” (434). There are then lists of prices for different goods that she purchased or would like to purchase.

In fact, one of the major threads of the book is exposing the finances behind the art. There’s a whole sequence in the book of e-mail exchanges asking about payment. After selling information to a tabloid writer, Ilya Grindeff’s alter ego / character, a character is seeking payment and there are dozens of pages trying to locate and retrieve the cheque she was promised. Meanwhile, in Lotteryland, wealth and prizes are distributed at random and the character is doing ‘luck checks’ on a lotto machine. Meanwhile. Rachel is seemingly sleeping with men for money, or maybe writing about a character who does so, or maybe is writing about her years in University. I’m not really sure, to be honest. The focus on finances is a clever commentary on art. They foreground all of the illusions we like to paint over with the final product. The work of art independent of market forces serves to reinforce the idea that art has a special status, when in fact it’s always grounded in economics. Essentially, we get thrown into some pretty interesting Marxist discourse: is debating over payment an artistic experience? Is art ever free of the tether of feeding the artist that makes it? These kinds of questions guide the work: “If there is a disappearance or breakdown it’s important to have a line of credit; it was not clear that books should be bought on the small number of credit cards acquired since the last purge” (434).

The work is driven in interesting ways, too, by desire. There are unspoken desires that permeate throughout each of the narrative threads. What is most compelling to me, though, was some (shockingly) some of the authors’ commentary on Tolkien. Early on, the book presents a case for writing a book that incorporates Arabic; the goal is to build understanding between the United States and the Middle East (the book is set in the early 2000s during the height of the war on terror). They comment on the way that Tolkien invented languages and included fragments of invented languages. The end result of this is not that Tolkien has produced knowledge for his audience, but instead desire: desire to learn more. They want to do something similar with Arabic, and there are Arabic lessons in the book, complete with alphabet translators. I loved this idea, that the novel will somehow produce desire to know more about the Middle East (and beyond, obviously).

Your Name Here deals with a lot of complex issues and makes unlikely leaps. These leaps are what kept me reading; I loved the odd little meditations. If you’re looking to connect with characters, I’d say your opportunities are pretty limited. If you’re looking for plot…also, reasonably lacking. Style the book has in spades. The philosophical and aesthetic exploration in the text is really compelling. 

The book has so much going for it. I loved a lot of it. It was maybe “ultimately unsatisfactory”---but that’s by design. I was never going to get a story. I was never going to get an ending. Even the ending offered feels like a new start. I honestly don’t know what to make of this book; it will both linger with me and not. What I can say is it was definitely a unique and therefore worthwhile experience.

You’ve been meaning to read it; you probably should. What a feat!