YOUR NAME HERE

An ouroboros—and a big one at that—of a postmodern yarn that threatens to swallow itself at any moment.

Rachel Zozanian is a “notorious recluse misanthrope,” author of the decidedly centrifugal tome Lotteryland, which just happens to share a display table at the local chain bookstore with Helen DeWitt’s Your Name Here. The two share more than that: There’s an alter-ego dimension here as DeWitt and her co-author, Australian journalist Gridneff, play off Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. As is her wont, announced in her brilliant debut novel, The Last Samurai (2000), DeWitt ranges across time to pepper her pages with references to the greats: Foucault, Homer, Debord, the X-Men. The dominant second language throughout is Arabic, reflecting the author’s current passions—to say nothing of statistics, the classics, and “Habermasian ideal speech situations.” If there’s a plot, it hinges on efforts to shake Rachel out of her torpor, on a slowly declining film director’s attempts to figure out how to film the unfilmable (“Forget Lotteryland,” says one interlocutor, “have you seen Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt? I was talking to Johnny Depp and he loves it, he’d love to work with you, what are you waiting for?”), and on DeWitt and Gridneff’s attempts via email to wrestle down whatever the hell their collaboration is supposed to yield. Call it high-pomo hijinks, where the story gives way to layered language, graphics, and meta-references (“And then there’s the engagement of the characters with Arabic, something that would have been unthinkable fifty, even ten years ago”); though, as if in a nod to traditional form, there is a surprise plot twist that relieves Rachel of her preoccupations. To call the book experimental is to understate, however, as Gridneff brightly notes late in the text, only if one isn’t up on “those 18th-century prepostmodernist time travellers Sterne and Diderot.”

At once bewildering and beguiling, and a groaning-table feast of words.