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!

Multiple Choice Alejandro Zambra

  I’m not quite sure what to make of Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice. It’s a really unique project that turns a standardized test into an authentic literary enterprise. Zambra explores the possibility of a standard set of A-B-C-D-E options turning into something more profound and interesting, blending poetry, autobiography (maybe), and fiction.

The book is divided into five sections. The first requires readers to pick the term that doesn’t match the heading or the other terms. The second is about putting sentences into their correct sequence. The third is about completing the sentences (fill-in-the-blanks), while the fourth requires readers to eliminate a sentence or sentences within a short story. The final section is reading comprehension and offers some more substantial (though still only roughly 5 page) stories. 

But Zambra is tricky. While there might be a bubblesheet to fill in at the back of the book, there is no answer key, nor could there be. The questions put readers into challenging positions and the stakes feel even bigger than actual standardized test questions. Consider, for example, the excluded term question for “Teach.” Readers are expected to pick one of the following that does not fit: A) preach, B) control, C) educate, D) initiate, E) screech. Now, I’d like to think that as a teacher I don’t “screech” but if I take that out it leaves “preach” and “control” still in the mix; there’s no good option. Similarly, some of the options double-up. Like for “Promise” the options read from A-E as complete / silence / promise / complete silence. Conversely, Zambra includes questions where all of the options seem good. For instance, the word “Letter” has the options for A) uppercase, B) lowercase, C) cursive, D) dead, and E) silent. Likewise, “Cut” allows for erase / annul / blot / expunge / wound. All of them are viable choices, and so it forces you to reflect on what your personal biases are. What seems most poetic to you?

Zambra is able to make use of structures to allow for multiple options, a choose-your-own-perspective with carefully crafted options. For instance, in one of the fill-in-the-blank questions, he provides the statement, “And if they have any ________ left, that’s what _____________ for.” The options offer very different possibilities for engaged readers. The options range for innocuous and innocent to politically charged to deeply depressing. Here’s what the options say if filled in:

And if they have any energy left, that’s what sports are for.

And if they have any hope left, that’s what reality is for.

And if they have any illusions left, that’s what the void is for.

And if they have any dissent left, that’s what the cops are for.

And if they have any neurons left, that’s what crack cocaine is for.

The cynicism and nihilistic mindset allows readers to choose their fate, but almost none of them are good ones. Each adds dimension in an interesting way.

When asked to sequence statements into a cohesive narrative, there are similar disruptions to our thinking. Some resequencing questions are standard and legitimate, but they all seem just a little bit off from what you might want to conclusively decide. For instance, in the piece “The second” you’re given the following sequence:

1. You try to remember your first Communion.

2. You try to remember your first masturbation.

3. You try to remember the first time you had sex.

4. You try to remember the first death in your life.

5. And the second.

The answers put you in a position where you have to “try” to remember something “and the second.” It feels a little bit off because if you’re remembering the second, then surely you’d remember the first, no? It also places you in a position that implies that you have to forget the others. For your reference, and to decide what selective forgetting you’ll engage in today, the available answers are as follows:

1. 1-5-2-3-4

2. 1-2-5-3-4

3. 1-2-3-5-4

4. 4-5-1-2-3

5. 4-3-2-1-5

The sequencing questions really help to emphasize how the order of presentation can impact our perception of a narrative. Several of the pieces are essentially flash fictions, but flash fictions that offer multiple paths at once. For example, there’s a piece called “Two hundred twenty-three.” It reads as follows:

1. You remember the freckles on her breasts, on her legs, on her belly, on her ass. The exact number: two hundred twenty-three. One thousand two hundred and seven days ago there were two hundred twenty-three.

2. You reread the messages she used to send you: They are beautiful, funny. Long paragraphs, vivid, complex sentences. Warm words. She writes better than you do.

3. You remember the time you drove five hours just to see her for ten minutes. It wasn’t ten minutes, it was the whole afternoon, but you like to think it was only ten minutes.

4. You remember the waves, the rocks. Her sandals, a wound on her foot. You remember your eyes daring from her thighs to her eyelashes.

5. You never got used to being with her. You never got used to being without her. You remember when she said, in a whisper, as if to herself: Everything is OK.

Option D is to go 2-3-4-5-1. Reading it in that mode seems to create a greater sense of loss, an intimation of time passing, and the degeneration of a relationship. Reading it start to finish (option E) feels, in some ways, like a more complete story—although I feel like section 2 should be closer to the end. It’s difficult to make a choice. 

In other sections, Zambra maintains a playfulness that makes this poetry test impossible to grade. In a piece called “A kick in the balls”, the statements are presented as follows:

1. You think of all the people, living or dead, near or far, men or women, from your country or abroad, who have reason to kick you in the balls.

2. You wonder if you deserve a kick in the balls.

3. You wonder if you deserve to be hated. You wonder if anyone really hates you.

4. You wonder if you hate anyone. You wonder if you hate the people who hate you.

5. Insomnia wounds and accompanies you.

Each of the answers, though, is mutually exclusive. You either get to choose 1-1-1-1-1 or 2-2-2-2-2 or 3-3-3-3-3 or 4-4-4-4-4 or 5-5-5-5-5. Despite there seeing to be a connection between the items, you’re only able to put yourself into a repetitive rumination. In “Rhyme”, the answers present uneven outcomes. The options are A) 5-1-2-3-4, B) 5-4-3-2-1, C) 1-2-3-4-5, D) 1-5-2-3-4, or E) 1-2-3-4. That’s a tricky one because it prevents you from selecting the statement that “you are not crazy”. If you’d like the statements for rhyme to try to the poem at home, here they are:

1. You search for words that rhyme with your first name.

2. You search for words that rhyme with your last name.

3. Your first and last names do not rhyme, but you search for words that rhyme with both your first and last names.

4. You search for words that don’t rhyme with either your first name or your last name, or with anything else.

5. You are not crazy.

Additionally, at least one poem in the sequencing section gives the same sequence for every option—and yet you might feel the resistance popping up in you that you want to revise, you want to create an option that isn’t there. The book is tricky in how it invites your contribution and then, when it doesn’t, you realize you’ve been trained the principles of rebellion: find the path you want, even if it isn’t there. In the poem “Scars,” the only option you’re provided is to read it sequentially, which goes like this:

1. You think about how the shortest distance between two points is the length of a scar.

2. You think: the introduction is the father, the climax is the son, and the resolution is the holy spirit.

3. You read books that are much stranger than the books you would write if you wrote.

4. You think, as if it were a discovery, that the last point in the line of time is the present.

5. You try to go from the general to the specific, even if the general is General Pinochet.

6. You try to go from the abstract to the concrete.

7. The abstract is the pain of others.

8. The concrete is the pain of others colliding with your body until you are completely invaded.

9. The concrete is something that can only grow.

10. Something like a tumor, or the opposite of a tumor: a child.

11. In your case, it’s a tumor.

The fatalism of the piece matches the fatalism of the options. You can only go so far, and yet…

At times, Zambra plays off this interactivity in a meta way. In one of the sections where you have select one for deletion, there’s a discussion of being a reader, a writer, a censor, all at once. Again, it’s a tricky one because the option is to delete none of the options. Every option after that refers to the previous option, meaning that no matter what you pick, you don’t get the power to delete any of these items:

1. I didn’t want to talk about you, but it’s inevitable.

2. I’m talking about you right now. And you’re reading this, and you know it’s about you.

3. Now I am words that you read and wish did not exist.

4. I hate you. 

5. You would like to have the power of a censor.

6. So no one else would ever read these words.

7. I hate you.

8. You ruined my life.

9. Now I am words you cannot erase.

There’s another section that is about the relationship between writing and truth and whether we have the power to remove portions of the narrative. It’s a complex and playful interplay of the details.

In one of the short stories in the reading comprehension section, there is a whole section about Chilean students learning to cheat that feels relevant. Zambra writes, “Even if we did nothing but study, we knew there would always be two or three impossible questions. We didn’t complain. We got the message: Cheating was just part of the deal” (66). What is really compelling here is a critique (or reflection, at least) of the education system that demands compliance with correct answers. The reflection continues, though, into a meditation on individualism: “I think that, thanks to our cheating, we were able to let go of some of our individualism and become a community. It’s sad to put it this way, but cheating gave us a sense of solidarity. Every once in a while we suffered from guilt, from the feeling that we were frauds—especially when we looked ahead to the future—but in the end our indolence and defiance prevailed” (66). I think this book could really help us to connect to those feelings of individualism and community. On the one hand, we are all creating individual answers (there’s no answer key, so no standard) but at the same time we are in dialogue with an extant discourse over which we have no control. 

Now that we have reached the end of the review, what would be the best way to summarize this text?

1. Which text? The review or the book?

2. Multiple Choice is a poetic experience that demands

3. Readers to engage with writers.

4. Writers to plan multiple avenues at once.

5. Happy reading for the audience of this review.