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!

Awaiting by Charisse Pearlina Weton

 

I’m going to begin with an embarrassing confession. I first started to write poetry (semi)seriously in University and at one point I wrote a long piece inspired by my stay in Italy called “anomie pompa.’ I’m sure the title meant something profound and clever, though now when I put the phrase into Google translate, I don’t get very far—or, more likely, I’m not as deep as I thought then. The poem was a kind of “mixed-media” collage, full of poetic bursts, dictionary definitions, stage directions, and scraps. At the time, I thought it was my best work ever: a postmodern tour-de-force. Now I’m not sure I could read it without my inner organs petrifying and my brain melting out my ears.

I bring this up because I started having flashbacks to my ex-masterwork while reading Charisse Pearlina Weston’s Awaiting. This is a poetry collection that, like the book in my previous review, was thrust into my hands with no context from Harneet. The back of the book describes it as “part autobiography, part play, part fictive dream as long poem” and as drawing “phrases and motifs from two seemingly disparate plays (Lorraine Hansberry’s What Use are Flowers? and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot) and entangles them into poetic remixes.” For context, I have no knowledge of Lorraine Hansberry’s work, but have read and seen Waiting for Godot several times. Even that did not prepare me, though, for engaging with Awaiting. If the words were lifted directly, I didn’t notice, though there was one part that sounded remarkably similar to a scene in Beckett’s novel Molloy. I would say, potentially, hesitantly, that Awaiting offers very little instruction for ‘how’ to read it; in particular, if this is meant as “part autobiography,” I wouldn’t say I know very much about Weston at all as a result.

But where thinking fails, Google succeeds: I did a Google search and discovered that Weston is a Black visual artist from Brooklyn (how does Harneet do it?! She’s always finding interesting people based on book covers alone). I wonder if engaging with Weston’s art in other mediums would help provide insight into the project here. I imagine she’s adept at speaking in multiple aesthetic languages, and seeing her at work in various forms would likely help me grapple with some of her key themes.

In any case, Awaiting is a bizarre little collection (?) of poems. It’s written as a play—sort of. The dramatis personae is pretty fun in that respect. The narrator is described as “the oiliness of memory” (7), the children are “the muted chorus” (8), and the audience is “the limit” (8). The characters that actually perform are Vision and a woman, who are both given lengthier descriptions.

The format of the poem seems to me to be integral to its core themes. The poem gravitates towards themes of performance and observation. Vision watches the woman. The woman seems to rotate the stage so that the audience is brought to her (rather than the usual inverse of the audience remaining seated and the performer coming to them.) It’s a nice coincidence that I recently finished a book about the male gaze and womens’ bodies that here we have a figure engaged in ambiguous motions being monitored by unspeaking audience members. I know the back of the book suggests this borrows from Waiting for Godot, but I’d be much more inclined to suggest it owes more to Beckett’s Quad and Quad II. It’s more about the motion than the words.

In that respect, there is a lot of playfulness around the spacing and layout of the poem. There is a section in the middle, for example, that is printed on black pages and is divided into some overlapping squares. Even in the main “narrative” (I’m hesitant to call it a story), there are at least two strands. There’s the sort of ‘narration’ which also serves as a dialogue with Vision’s marginal voice. I was drawn back to the description of the Audience as “the limit.” I find that particularly interesting since the limit of the page is taken up by Vision’s voice and we ourselves are forced into certain perspectives by the woman and are forced to navigate the artful and playful spacing of the page—a style I have long recognized the appeal of.

This isn’t to say Weston’s work relies purely on visual flare to create an interest. Her work has some excellent turns of phrase and linguistic intrigue. One passage, for instance, refers to “the kind of touch that flees, / yearns time for reverie, burns as fire / with no source, as beheaded heat, a hull / of agitated halting breath which floats lonely, / lovingly upwards to ceiling to roof to out of / out of reach” (45).First of all, I adore the phrase “beheaded heat.” Secondly, I appreciate the double-down and line break for “out of / out of.” The redoubling suggests an even further limit—not only is it out of reach, but it is beyond even the possibility of being out of reach.

The playfulness of the language seems to offer an alternative conception of relationships between self and society. There is, I would say, some political undertones to the work, though not as bludgeoningly transparent as Instagram poets. There is simultaneously a philosophical register I find difficult to resist: “We are in no danger of thinking anymore, / not here in the aftermath of vacated time, in the residue of barricaded remembrance / in the slow deliberate and deafening violence of curtain in a hasty crawl / to the meeting of itself” (40). There’s an ominous quality to the passage that evokes for me someone like Maurice Blanchot; the disaster, as he describes it, has a striking resemblance to “the aftermath of vacated time.” I think also about memory as an involuntary faculty, where there is the “residue of barricaded remembrance.” The “deafening violence of curtain” is also a great line, even if I can’t quite place it within a broader context of the poem—although it does seem to have a parallel to Nudités féminines: Images, pensées et sens du désir by Laurence Pelletier. 

Some of my favourite sections of the poem are the ones that are more sustained and, in some ways, direct. One section discusses “redacted lavender” (what a phrase, again!) “whose pages threaten turns / to so much more” (37). There’s a sort of violence to the language, or at least the possibility of it. The passage continues to discuss how “those professions unconscious / hardly ever arrive / but to the closure / thriving damp of solitude. / to the kind that boils / from its own, foreclosing longing” (37). In this section, there’s also an exploration of the central relationship in the collection. There’s a tenuousness to the connection and a recognition (or misrecognition) that the speaker documents as follows:

i liked when he called me
by another name
because it was deliberate
he told me later
to imagine so many different
things in the midst
of actions so specific

and so about being with

and in somewhere
so vast and small
in the same instance. (37)

There are a few moments in the poem that discuss being named and here the idea of multiple names reflects the multiplicity of identity. There is a shifting nature to who we are and here, tenuous though the relationship with Vision seems to be, the woman values this recognition of multiple identities existing simultaneously—”so vast and small / in the same instance” (37). The lines which follow serve an almost incantatory function in their repetition:

to imagine while

folding into the intimacy

he said
of my faltering soul
he said
of my faltering soul
he said
was a gift to never be
without remark.
and time.
within just those little
utterances
space chopping hour
doubles
and minutes crinkle. (37)

The notion of folding into one another really draws on some central themes in the work. I can picture all of the squares in the black page section similarly folding, overlapping, relying on one another. Here the repetition serves to redouble a statement (because saying it once is too precarious? Because saying it more makes it more real?). The motif of time also recurs and “minutes crinkle.” There’s a fuzziness and fragility, even a brittleness, to the rigidity of time that starts to poke through here.

Earlier in the text, there’s another section that is very well-developed and once again relies on doubling—of identity, of words. Weston writes, “forest i hardly hold any [longer] / except in the flesh of leaves / [amongst] dreams, i begin to fall / so deeply in love with loving / for the first time that i learn / to unusually speak in circular beats” (29). I suppose this is where Weston offers some strategy for reading her work. The repetition of “in love with loving” and noting that it’s the “first time” (again that time motif) sets up the premise of the book. The phrase “unusually speak in circular beats” is also unnatural. It would make more sense to say “speak unusually in circular beats” or “speak in unusually circular beats.” Yet here we have an unnatural-sounding phrase that initiates us into the work and inaugurates our expectations. Weston gives us an unnatural reading to prime us into the unnatural modes we’ll have to force ourselves into—again, the woman controls the audience, not the other way around.

That section of the poem then goes on to tell the story of the woman and her brother and their father, “at this point in the the play / a compilation of the admiral agent spy / the cyclopic tyrant scooping us up out from] / the squalor of our bleeding / breathing dark fleshy lives [and into the valleys of his decommissioned fingerprints]” (29). You can easily see the word substitutions or aural similarities that are hinted at, allowing multiple meanings to exist at once. For example, “the squalor of our bleeding” would likely double with the phrase “the squalor of our breeding”, given that the father is brought into the discussion immediately prior. Also, as an aside, “decommissioned fingerprints” is a perfect poetic phrase.

Within that same passage is a complicated development of the relationship. It’s unclear whether “a woman listens. leans in. holds up holds up / and neither i nor he in this draft / register / the one at the desk peering under / her.” It’s unclear how many people are actually in this situation. We’re not clear on whether she is experiencing or watching or remembering someone else’s memory. It’s even more complex because the next line introduces the first person: “as i remember it / thick rimmed glasses / her raising one light-skinned / freckled cheek to curl one side / of a full pale purple set of lips” (29). Is the first person also the third person? It feels playful to have a first person speaking in third person in a situation where the number of figures in the room is ambiguous. It should also be noted that I’m removing the spacing here, which makes the situation even more complex.

The collection offers a playfulness that is a devious as it is clever. It was unfair of me to suggest that Weston doesn’t teach us how to read her work. Square brackets offer a guideline to her linguistic shapeshifting:

[the face she makes
as] she [s]lightly pretends to [only]
half listen, [to only] half conceal
amusement by our blind [comfort
within the rubbery flesh ridges
of unfolded greatness]. i do distinctly
recall my brother’s Chesire smile
his white white teeth [purring] (29)

One element of the book that is strange to me (only one?) is that there is a sort of appendix that gives a full different (?) earlier (?) version of the poem. I’d be curious to discuss the genesis of the poem. It seems that the original appears as a footnote of sorts (and again reverses time—that which came first comes last). The extended version flourishes into a series of acts and scenes, but the relationship is not entirely clear. It warrants further examination.

Overall, I liked Awaiting. There is a lot about it that is perplexing, but being perplexed is not entirely without its charm. It almost inspires me to go back into my weirdness.

Happy reading, everyone!