Your Name Here

by Helen DeWitt, Ilya Gridneff

A major literary event over two decades in the making, Your Name Here marks the seismic return of Helen DeWitt ( The Last Samurai ), and will introduce readers to the riveting voice of Ilya Gridneff.

A book of unparalleled scope and vision, Your Name Here is a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books. In this death-defying feat of ambition, collaborators Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff weave together America’s “War on Terror,” countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, dream analysis, multiple languages, emails, images, graphs, into something wondrous and unique.

A metafictional Pygmalion story reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman‘s Oscar-nominated Adaptation, or Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler; Your Name Here is a rare work of art that captures the process of becoming itself. A reminder that a masterpiece and a doomed voyage look the same at the start.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, 21st Century, Literature, Literary Fiction, The United States Of America, American

600 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 2025

About the author

Helen DeWitt (born 1957 in Takoma Park, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C.) is a novelist.

DeWitt grew up primarily in South America (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador), as her parents worked in the United States diplomatic service. After a year at Northfield Mount Hermon School and two short periods at Smith College, DeWitt studied classics at the University of Oxford, first at Lady Margaret Hall, and then at Brasenose College for her D.Phil.

DeWitt is best known for her acclaimed debut novel, The Last Samurai. She held a variety of jobs while struggling to finish a book, including a dictionary text tagger, a copytaker, and Dunkin' Donuts employee, she also worked in a laundry service. During this time she reportedly attempted to finish many novels, before finally completing The Last Samurai, her 50th manuscript, in 1998.

In 2005 she collaborated with Ingrid Kerma, the London-based painter, writing limit5 for the exhibition Blushing Brides.

In 2004, DeWitt went missing from her home in Staten Island. She was found unharmed a few days later at Niagara Falls.

DeWitt lives in Berlin where she has recently finished a second novel, Your Name Here, in collaboration with the Australian journalist Ilya Gridneff. DeWitt had met Gridneff in an East London pub shortly before her departure for New York; impressed by the linguistic virtuosity of his e-mails, she suggested a book inspired by Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, or Being John Malkovich, with Gridneff as Malkovich.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 1 out of 5]

So there I am, walking down the street. It’s been a few weeks since the crisp air of early April, so people are more comfortable with short sleeves and short shorts. It’s been a few years since I have been in a serious relationship. I prowl the streets, making this the single daily mission. Just putting one foot in front of the other, making sure I am getting my step count in. I have been losing and gaining the same 10 lbs for over five years now. Currently, we are in the loss cycle. I am feeling a bit more confident. And here comes the bombshell of my dreams. I don’t want to do her the disservice of describing her, but let’s just say she has the grace to rival Audrey Hepburn. Fuck it, I’ll describe her. Short sleeves and short shorts. Coal black hair, straight. Sunglasses on but not large enough to use as a mask, like some do. She carries a book in her left hand and it doesn’t look like fairy porn. She is not wearing headphones and seems to be taking in the city as she walks. And now she is sitting on a bench on the sidewalk, perhaps taking a breather. This is my chance. I haven’t really done a “cold open” in a few years. Not since I dated the barista all those years back. It’s time now to see if I can do this or if I will be eating shit, rejected, sad, lonely, and slouched over. But wait a second. My confidence is not what it used to be. Chances are high that I will be rejected. What would she see in me anyway? No no, I shake my head. This is beta talk. You’re an alpha man! You’re a wolf! David Goggins is telling you not to waste the day. The Instagram algorithm told you to seize this moment. GO SEIZE THE MOMENT. Go up to her. But you know what? I am not even doing this because of an issue of confidence. Obviously I am confident. Everyone around me knows I am confident. I have confidence in abundance, perhaps the best confidence. I always take the lead with conversations anyway. I talk for a living. Friends and family know of all the times I have been confident. MANY such cases. So no, not an issue of confidence. I will likely not be rejected either. I am sexy! So that’s not an issue. But you know what? YOU KNOW WHAT? I have just realized that dating doesn’t fit my schedule at the moment. I have so much to do. I am finishing up this damned program afterall. And work, don’t forget work. If I work 5-8 hours a day on average, where is the time to date? And you know women these days, right? What are the chances that we hit it off and that she is my muse? Likely I am going to be spending all this time and money to get to know a girl that isn’t even right for me. This is going to go nowhere and we are speeding down a highway to a few weeks of a heartbreak at best and a few years of celibacy at worst. I am not going through that again, am I? I know my values. I know what I stand for. And the book she is holding is probably fairy porn. And so there you go, we probably don’t even have literature as a common subject of discussion. I knew it.

Did any of this happen? Who gives a shit. It’s not important. What is important is why I did what I did. I am coping. I am coping pretty hard. The more realized among us can tell that I am weaving a tale that is too tall even for me to believe in. I am trying to convince myself of why it is okay to fail. And that’s the DeWitt situation here. One addition though: she is AWARE that she is doing it! She is self-aware! She knows this book is nothing and she can anticipate your confused comments. She has seen it all coming. I mean… for god’s sake, look at this paragraph from the book:

“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 traveller, 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 Lotterlyland 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.”

So she is not hearing anything she did not anticipate. And we all know that if we anticipate the pain and our own shortcomings, we avoid the pain. A universal truth. If you see it coming, YOU WERE AHEAD OF IT. You did it. And now you won. It is now YOUR truth, YOUR story.

Right?

At some point, somewhere between the 50th and 100th page, you start to realize that Your Name Here is not only masturbatory, but honestly a bit of an insult. It starts with the cover, where Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy, Salinger, and Bernhard are namedropped with nothing but bad faith. You think this will be a literary event and you jump in, just because there might be some fun Calvino hype in here. At first, the effort is rewarded. And I mean reward in the most Pavlovian/Skinnerian sense imaginable. You recognize the name of a niche book/author. Dopamine hit. You can read the Farsi/Arabic alphabet. Dopamine hit. You know the Criterion films she is dropping. Dopamine hit. Houellebecq. Kafka. Beckett. Fellini. Mastroianni. Jung. Arsenal. Iran. London. 8½. MSN. Yahoo. La Dolce Vita. Gilliam. Nietzsche. Kurosawa. Kiarostami. Kobayashi. Leone. Fonda. Teshigahara. Tarkovsky. Ozu. Wilder. Bergman. Mizoguchi. Wenders. Stewart. Kelly. Hitchcock. Demme. Nolan. Cassavetes. McInerney. Easton Ellis. Safran Foer. Are you having fun reading these? That’s what the book becomes. Names. Names. Names. Name. Name.

[ANY] Name Here.

I hope there exists no reality in which a poor soul picks up this book and finds him/herself inadequate. You are not missing anything. You don’t need to understand the references. Understanding the references may actually make you angry. You may realize some great injustice has been done and you can’t do much about it. You were promised edification and all you got was the person you despise talking to at the party: every topic leads back to them, every story about them becomes about high art, and the high art they consume is better than yours. And if you point this out, YOU are insecure. You are feeling insecurity in your position. Don’t point it out! Just enjoy being in the presence of a “master” who knows their trade. And DeWitt is a master. Afterall, she knows what a book is. I don’t. I am just some guy. I should be lucky to have experienced so many names.

Who knew reading email exchanges between high-brow snobs could be so grating, by the way. Hundreds of pages of emails printed in this book. Never a straight answer or comment. All allusion. And the moment something threatens to become too real between correspondents, they start speaking in German or Welsh, bringing up nothing references to Middle Eastern history, or else just ghosting entirely.

[Max Simon]

Your Name Here is a failure of its own construction, mostly because there is no Your Name Here. Instead, YNH is the umbrella term for a three-tiered metafictional document of DeWitt’s struggle to follow up the Last Samurai. If that sounds like a lot, well, it is a lot, but I think I’m just dumb enough to have had a wonderful time reading this.

[Yahaira]

I feel like I’ve read this book before and like I’ve never read anything like it.

This book confused me. Not so much storywise, but rather feeling wise. I’m not one of those people who writes their thoughts or reviews immediately after closing the book; I like to have a little time to allow the book to expand or shrink in my mind, but I am one of those people who can immediately sense my love, attachment, hatred, ambivalence, fill in the blank, towards a book. While I mostly enjoyed YNH, I wouldn’t have devoured it if I hadn't, there’s this sense of emptiness I feel after finishing. Or, put another way, this book feels like it was both encased in amber - you can really feel the 20 years it took to get this out- and like it kept being thawed out to be messed with (yes, I know amber isn’t thawed, it’s a mixed metaphor!) with maybe too much added (or maybe too much of the same) to ‘flesh it out’.

Is YNH post-modern? Is it post-pomo? While it’s essentially a post 9/11 book (a lot of it has to do with the US and UK invasion of Iraq), it’s also a metanarrative on the publishing world and the difficulties of getting things published, mainly YNH. It’s also intertextual AF. This isn’t so much nested as it is braided. As it wraps around itself it manages to be linear but with constant narrative interruptions. Flipping through the book now I can see how it slowly morphs; you don’t remember while you're reading how it all started. I’m starting to question myself, was there a thread I missed?

If you’ve read Dewitt before, then you know what she thinks of the publishing machinery, of (art under) capitalism, and, most importantly I think, about learning -languages specifically. While The Last Samurai had Ancient Greek and Japanese running through it, a running gag in YNH is that the book is famous for teaching Arabic to the reader, creating a sort of craze for the language and a hope it will help get more CIA-backed funding for art. If people can learn an Elvish language from reading Tolkien or Klingon from watching Star Trek, why not learn a language you may need if terrorists hijack the plane you're reading the book in. Maybe the US government can use the novel as a way to teach troops new languages as the war on terror rages on.

There are multiple 2nd person chapter breaks telling you how you are reading the new Helen Dewitt book - in this reality Dewitt is a best selling novelist, one whose books are bought at airports before a flight. You are hating the novel, not getting it, waiting for something to happen, or wishing you could get back to the novel within the novel - Lotteryland by Rachel Zozanian. There are emails (so many emails) between Dewitt and Gridneff, a tabloid and war journalist she met at a bar years earlier, talking about the book. There are emails from their alter egos Rachel Zozanian (her debut becoming a cult novel) and Alyosha/Misha/Dmitri/Kaplan/Alexander, a tabloid and war journalist she met at a bar years earlier, talking about the book. There’s a plot following Zozanian’s life after an attempted suicide, someone trying to adapt her novel into a movie, and meeting up with said reporter. There are excerpts of Zozanian’s novel Lotteryland, a sort of dystopian where every basic good is distributed through a rigged lottery system and the MC is trying to game it. There’s a fictional memoir by an unnamed narrator who I just assumed was Zozanian (1.1.1. headings (is it referring to DNS somehow?)( I feel like I’m losing it.))), but now I’m questioning it all.

This is A LOT.

Yet it is weirdly propulsive.

YNH is strongest for me when it focuses on Zozanian, who is out of sentences, out of words. Her parts alone were the most human for me. Her sort of neuroses - she has a phobia of the spoken word, she prefers the written word to phone calls, hence all the emails - and struggles - maybe this book will make them millions! and she’ll have more time to write what she wants - are the heart of the novel. The ideas of living or coping in this absurd existence, thinking about artifice and reality, how language can lose meaning, run through her and continue out in layers upon layers.

But the chaos. The chaos never quite coalesced for me. Maybe that’s the point? The “book” (which book?!) is a failure. Language has failed. The ending was never there (oh but there was a sort of ending that came out of nowhere, it was just dropped in our laps and then the book ends, leaving you with a sort of bomb in your hands). Coherence? Don’t know it! Dewitt and Gridneff make you work for it which in turn makes you attached to the story, the characters, the weirdness of it all. Is that the trick? Make the whole thing so baffling that you just accept it, even protect it? Look, in the end this book is funny, and smart, though maybe a little too smart for its own good as it’s always ready to defend itself against criticisms that will be leveled at it.

This is my longwinded way of saying that I wish this were just a Dewitt/Zozanian novel. I’ll honestly say that I didn’t get the love or fascination for Alyosha/Misha/Dmitri/Kaplan/Alexander’s emails. They’re…emails. Is this the source of the emptiness I feel?

I wouldn’t recommend beginning your Dewitt journey with this one. Start with The English Understand Wool to see Dewitt’s mastery of satire. Or start with The Last Samurai (I promise you it’s just deceptively long) to really feel the magic and beauty of her work. You want to be a completist? Pick up YNH. You already need to be in Dewitt’s world, you need to be familiar with her personal and publishing history, to really appreciate this one I feel. I’ve just thought of a third category, someone who’s new to pomo or po-pomo, or po-popomo (I can keep going since I’m just making up terms now) and this would be completely wild and fresh.

Back to the whole ‘encased in amber’ thing. I keep asking myself if I would have reacted to this book the same way if it had come out 20 years ago and I was just picking it up for the first time now, or if this feeling is something else? Is it something about the topic or is it the multiple framings and the idea of a novel reacting to pomo novels in 2025? The thread concerning Arabic and the wars in the ‘Middle’ East is, of course, too relevant and shows that things didn’t just start recently as some claim. Miscommunication and the questioning of truth and reality is pretty much something we all go through every day as AI slop, propaganda, and the surveillance state continue to spread and grow. So maybe the emptiness is more of an out of time-ness wobbly feeling. I don’t know what I’m saying anymore. I realize that this is the kind of book that has you think of something and just as quickly lose the thought. Was I going to say something about staleness? Am I back to the damn amber? Where did I even end up after 1200 words?

[Jonfaith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe you’re gay. A gay robot. Are there other robots like you?

Maybe this is not the best book to be reading.

You can’t say I wasn’t warned. The piece in the NYT was wary that the novel might be simply a compendium of emails larded with surrounding narratives recalling Adaptation (2002). I was still excited and tend to agree with the fears expressed in the Times article: nominally it is Fellini’s 8½ (1963) which mirrors the satire of the publishing world and the concurrent War on Terror.

I should honestly know better. The simple nods to Calvino and how it is for the wrong novel which he’s normally cited and how it might be the case that Hunter Thompson is underrated and Tom Wolfe the opposite is a sensible perspective, how someone should spend their life with Criterion Collection editions and literary theorists and consequently not be troubled by character or plot. How gauche!

I will probably keep my copy.

[Richard Derus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Week of 11 January 2026 top 40 fiction bestselling titles from independent presses as sold by independent bookstores throughout the United States.
One of LitHub's 100 Notable Small Press Books for 2025!
One of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2025!


Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A major literary event over two decades in the making, Your Name Here marks the seismic return of Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai), and will introduce readers to the riveting voice of Ilya Gridneff.

A book of unparalleled scope and vision, Your Name Here is a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books. In this death-defying feat of ambition, collaborators Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff weave together America’s “War on Terror,” countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, dream analysis, multiple languages, emails, images, graphs, into something wondrous and unique.

A metafictional Pygmalion story reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman‘s Oscar-nominated Adaptation, or Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler; Your Name Here is a rare work of art that captures the process of becoming itself. A reminder that a masterpiece and a doomed voyage look the same at the start.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A literary landscape infested with "pullulating DaVinci Codeed masses" decried, a celebration of Arabic language and literature "unthinkable fifty, even ten years ago", a six hundred-page high-concept literary jape that does gymnastics sophisticated enough to impress the literati and cow the middlebrow into quiescence...did I get it? does anyone get it?...this will gatekeep the hell out of Literature and that's a shame. It's fun. I know a lot of people will bounce off the idea of first, second (ugh) *and* third-person narratives in thirty pages, still less the nods and winks to multitudes of novels, writers, stories, movements, that form the matter behind this book. It's a lot. It's meant to be a lot. It's not making the read easy for you.

In 2026 you have immense resources, all free to use and instantly available 24/7/365. to follow rabbit holes to look stuff up. I love that fact, I enjoy that experience; that means I enjoy this read. (I'm not calling it a story, it's not one, it's either no story at all or skatey-eight skabillion of them.) If you're worried someone is Judging You for your uneducated, unsophisticated take on Your Name Here, you're right—they are doing that; turn it around. Judge them for being so snobbish. For making this complicated, convoluted read a critical darling...question their motives, impugn their legitimacy to judge what is or is not Literature. Challenge gatekeepers; good ones, who want to protect standards and increase others' knowledge bases, rise to the challenge to say *why*; snobs sneer and walk away.

Both responses are valid and supported...somewhere...in the text.

I'm not hopeful that masses of y'all will be rushing to get your ten-dollar ebooks of this title. I realize what I've said so far is going to break some brains, tire some eyes, and fail to ignite the fuel of fun that lies inside this chunky book. It's a commitment of time and energy. It's arch, the way Ducks, Newburyport and Milkman (two books I deeply enjoyed) were arch: playing very complex games with The Rules℠, like pretending Pynchon and Italo Calvino aren't difficult to read, will always put some readers...intelligent readers, people who love the act of reading as much as anyone can...right off a book.

I'm hopeful you'll give the book a try. Take it slowly, read it in chunks. Stop wherever it changes tense, for example, and come back later. Try, in other words, different ways to relate to reading a novel. This is a novel that can reward you making that effort if anything you read can.

I've been gate-kept out of offering my opinion on this read because so many have praised it immoderately, and so many have slagged it off so intently for the same reasons others have praised it. That makes writing about a book in any kind of helpful (or intended to be helpful) mode an invitation to those who do not agree with one's opinion to get mouthy. That's tiresome and tiring, and I really did not want to get into it.

I read the most fulsome and the most dismissive reviews I could find. It was amazing to me the precise same book I read, described in similar terms to each other, could lead to such very different personal conclusions. It made me feel the work was well worth calling still more attention to, because this dichotomy of opinion can't be solely about craft; it's about the point of the read.

I found it to be a worthwhile use of my shrinking supply of eyeblinks. I can't give it a perfect rating, I was never panting to get back to it or chewing over some insight until long into the night. It's snobby in the same way I am. It's beautiful in the way I resonate to but know others won't. It's too long.

And I would read it again.

[Alex O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this one a lot. Helen DeWitt is hilarious - every page made me laugh, it seemed! Novels within novels, a fascinating look at the process of "becoming" - in all of its mess, rabbit trails, dead ends, ups and downs.

A bit aimless, and never came together in the way that I found particularly satisfying, which was the point I am sure. But still, despite that, I really enjoyed the journey. I would definitely read it again.

I really enjoyed all of the film and literature references and discussions, probably the highlight of the book for me!

Grateful to Dalkey Archive for the ARC!

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have very little idea what I read, but it was excellent.

[Stewart Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wrote a multi-paragraph review and then accidentally clicked the back arrow - apparently Goodreads has no concept of saving drafts, so my detailed thoughts are lost to the void and I have no desire to conjure them again. The book is messy, hilarious, and always fun to read. I want more publishers to let DeWitt do her thing.

[Dillon Ostlund · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hardly do real reviews these days but I have a significant emotional investment in the success of this book.

Helen DeWitt is supremely talented. If you haven’t heard of her you’re not alone but also you have to figure that out. Her work tends to carry this cynical and understated tone while also somehow managing to be intricate and full of heart?

This book itself is a recursive metafictional disasterpiece. It makes you feel dumb and then jokes about how it probably is making you feel dumb by accident. It bores you at times and then acknowledges that “right about now you are probably feeling bored.” And somehow it works! Without being a gimmick or a cliche, it works so well.

All I can say is if you like the work of Charlie Kaufman and Italo Calvino, this book is for you. Give it a whirl!

[michal k-c · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I might just be allergic to DeWitt's whimsy and smugness, which seems to really impress the literati but always just strikes me as juvenile. The book is pitched as some all encompassing encyclopedic novel that spans the celebrity cult of scientology to the war on terror; I kept reading, waiting for the book to have anything novel to say about any of those topics. The book isn't even really all that experimental (despite its own near-constant gesturing towards its own ambition), and never at any point is able to push beyond the artificial confines of its own design. I would even say that the novel isn't enough of a mess, that its architecture is a little too sound for what it purports to be / do.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s so much talk about the allusive “internet novel” and what it will take to write for a post-literate generation. This book, despite coming before our current crop of algorithms, delivers something very close to a true “internet novel”. It doesn’t do this by relying solely on internet references (although it does do that quite well), but also through the very structure of the book. As we all lament about diminished attention spans, this book embraces it, making you comfortable with 1/3rd of the narrative before ripping you out and dropping you into another plot. I’m not sure all of it works, but I was very inspired by the effort and genuinely enjoyed reading it.

[eddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

year of big books big book #2. quite enjoyed this! maddening in good way (madness-inducing, extremely funny, very clever despite constantly insisting to the contrary). both conceptually addresses and immerses one directly into the space-time flattening experience of being stuck at the intersection of accelerating information streams and the interests of capital. traversing a sort of a melted spiderweb of information and collage and overlapping narratives, with entire worlds more information gestured at in the text's shadowy wings, trapdoors and wormholes and loops and curtains and trick mirrors, weird mutations, spam spam and more spam, lost selves, "help! Phone out of data, can't get to Starbucks" (https://x.com/helendewitt/status/2023...), paranoia, the phone is ringing, a lot of fear, fear of words, of speaking, the fear of falling down language's writhing, knotting paths of meaning and getting your Self more lost. and then the fear of falling down in general really. the fear of living in a place that makes it easy to fall and joyfully leaves you behind if you do. and then just who are "you" exactly? just where are You exactly?? and then... huh? what? huh? tom fucking cruise??

amazing that this was written in the mid 2000s considering how tapped into today internet brain it feels. kind of ended up doing Accidental Syllabus by reading this after speak/stop and multiple choice, with their metatextual awareness, formal playfulness, and mutual interest in how narrative emerges (or fails to emerge) out of chaotic information fields / varied experiences. gave me a good intro to diving into this, fun! can't wait to read more helen dewitt!

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

You are reading the new review of Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt. You don't like this review as much as the reviewer's last one. You prefer the reviews that are short and funny, while there's some that are long, pretentious, and, let's face it, just plain weird. This review is unfortunately of the latter. Not only is it annoyingly weird, but it seems that you've become a part of it somehow. And how is that fair?? You don't recall giving this reviewer creative license over your activities. Who does he think he is? In fact, who do you think you are? Are you Shawn or Peter? Liz or Josh or Janie? Matt's Fantasy Reviews or Mike's Fantasy Reviews? How have you forgotten? Oh well, that doesn't matter, all that matters is that this reviewer is slandering your good name. You started following him after meeting him on Discord. Or maybe after reading one of his short stories. Or maybe you just saw a funny review one day and clicked follow. Either way, he needs to go back to the funny reviews ASAP. You definitely prefer those ones, although some of them feature too much profanity. You don't like those ones. Some of his reviews cross lines, and then you don't click Like for a couple days to teach him a lesson, but this one, this review right here, well, you might actually have to unfollow them. You really might. YOU REALLY REALLY MIGHT!!!!!!!!!! Unless this review is actually representative of what reading Your Name Here by Hewlen DeWitt feels like, in which case, you will pass on reading it, but also, you can't say for sure if that's the case without first reading it. YOU ARE SO CONFLIXTED!!! How long will this stupid thing even

[Bert Hirsch · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have mixed emotions regarding this book. As context, the overriding motivation reading it to completion was rooted in the high regard I have for Helen De Witt who wrote one my favorite books, The Last Samurai. Read during the dark days of the pandemic when libraries were closed this was the first long novel read as an eBook. Last year when I heard about the book before publication I went to some lengths to get a copy of N+1 which had printed an excerpt some years ago. Indeed, this collaboration with Ilya Gridneff a world trotting journalist has taken years to come to fruition. Sadly, it has missed the mark.

One problem is the introduction of various aliases for the main two characters-DeWitt and Gridneff-whose emails back and forth to one another takes up most of the narrative structure. Several other writers are referenced as compass points for what DeWitt and Gridneff hope to achieve: Kathy Ackrer, Don DeLillo, Jay McInerny, Bret Easton Ellis, Pynchon and others.

A character created as a stand-in for DeWitt is one Rachel Zozanian , a depressed writer whose Lotteryland has become a hot book attracting movie producers and directors. In it there are some humorous asides about a lottomonitor that improves one's luck as you input characteristics one possesses. In addition, there are some off the wall descriptions, some referencing the Lubavitch Sect of Judaism - a woman with a large tumor visits a Lubavitch master who directs a vast search of all the doorpost mezuzah's and find one word misspelled; he then orders all the scrolls to be corrected and miraculously the woman's tumor disappears. There are also episodes entailing Oxford female graduate students who prostitute themselves for money they cannot ever earn as writers, artists or academics. And other episodes describing escapades Gridneff falls into covering the Iraq war and writing pieces for tabloids hunting down the likes of Brittany Spears and Angelina Jolie.

Curiously, reading on, wanting to believe the mess would be clarified, I continued out of a weird sense of loyalty to DeWitt, a writer I cherished for The Last Samurai and of whom I had read about her difficulties getting her work published: and lo and behold when I got to page 275 with a section entitled The Reader's Guide to Camouflage - "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...". It was, as if, DeWitt was reading my mind and understood how her readers may be responding; this "confession" kept me engaged and, there and then, I decided to continue while along the way other "editorial notes" detailing the books difficulties would appear to again keep me engaged.

Near the end the last 15 pages read like an epilogue explaining the loose ends that befuddled the text for hundreds of pages and if revealed sooner may have helped the reader better understand the overall schemes; the summary was more cogent, and I was disappointed that the authors hadn't achieved writing what they now described near the end.

This epilogue is shortly followed with an out and out apology DeWitt writes to her cowriter:
"I'm sorry things didn't work out with YOUR NAME HERE... all the things we discussed never made it into the book because there were too many disruptions dealing with the biz. It's my fault that YNH didn't turn out to be a million-dollar baby; you gave me some amazing material to work with, and I failed to do it justice. You were definitely the best thing in the book."

Rereading this I am saddened that DeWitt ended here. Her stand-in, Rachel Zozanian did suffer with suicidal thoughts, and one only hopes, if reflective of DeWitt's thoughts, she will free herself to write more- her talent, though not clarified by this effort, is clearly evident.

One final thought: as we all (or most of us) spend more time communicating via texts and emails, digitalized formats we may end up with fragmented lives, divided selves - in this regard DeWitt's text may prove prophetic, one I hope is not forthcoming - I long more for narrative forms that slow down, savor details and engage in an emotional and deeper level.

Despite it all I remain a big fan of Helen DeWitt!

[angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

truly in a world of its own but also extremely incoherent. i liked the last samurai more !! but i still have so much respect for helen dewitt

[Edward Champion · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm probably going to be in the minority here, but (1) it's always a treat to go on a journey through Helen DeWitt's wildly original and quirky mind and (2) reading this book brought me back to fond memories of my twenties in which I scooped up the fun of the postmodernists who were then in vogue (Coover, Bathelme, Barth, Sorrentino, et al.). While I don't think Helen DeWitt will singlehandedly restore pomo (and I would say that this book, coauthored with Ilya Gridneff, is an effort to be a postmodern postmodern postmodern book -- sort of akin to the underrated 1948 film noir THE LOCKET), with Rachel Zozanian serving as a DeWitt alter ego, this book is giddy about Arabic and willing to call out the overconfident way in which people believe that they are experts on a subject after reading a Wikipedia entry (there is one casually yet hilariously brutal ripose to a Wikipedia entry on the "superfluous man"). It's interesting that this book, which I believe has been sitting in a drawer for twenty years, should be published in 2025, when many of the concerns about knowledge and belief addressed in this novel (interwoven with some potshots about the absurd whims of the publishing industry) are perhaps MORE relevant in an age 0f Trump in which we can't even get people to believe in objective facts anymore and AI is threatening to destroy writing and intellectualism. DeWitt is one of our great fiction-writing proponents of human intelligence. And this novel is a lot of fun to read -- well, if you're wired with Adorno and old Fellini movies permanently whirring through your synapses (as I am).

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 3 out of 5]

Upon completing Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s Your Name Here I have to say I was a bit relieved, but also just as deeply intrigued about what I had just experienced. The novel is a chaotic mess. It’s a multi-tiered moebius of narrative that has some really fun and incredible composite parts, however, I’m not sure it ever achieves any kind of gestalt. Not just because there’s a whole lot of kind of dross conceit of e-mails.

Things that I really dug in the book and would have loved to see more of were around the novel-within-the-novel, the reputed Lotteryland by the reclusive character-within-the-novel qua stand-in for the author of the novel itself. I also enjoyed much of the “war reporting” that was within the email sections and the essential thrust of the theme DeWitt was playing toward with the dichotomies of foreign and fictional languages.

Lotteryland itself felt like a novel that DeWitt had probably written and re-written without being able to get it just right as a standalone manuscript (or maybe she had and decided to chop it up?). It’s a dystopian alternate world where people engage with a “lotto” box in their house. You write prompts in it to test your “luck” and win prizes/social benefits. Some people seem to be “luckier” than others. As the protagonist of Lotteryland becomes addicted to the machine, he’s blessed with great luck, winning elaborate prizes such as a Lamborghini, exotic trips, etc. but doesn’t claim the prizes in disbelief of his luck and that the prizes are real.

The sub-novel echoes a simmering issue in the U.S. that I see with the rise of not just online sports betting apps, but the recent/novel phenomenon of “prediction markets” where people bet real money “guessing what’s going to happen” on virtually anything—bets on who will win an election, what will happen in a war, news, on and on.

While I did enjoy some of the war correspondence elements of the email sections, overall, I think the novel hangs its hat too much on the reader “enjoying” the kind of allusive and playful style of Gridneff’s emailing voice—a voice that is very pointedly not the way he speaks in person, but a highly cultivated voice he renders in his emailing. This voice is frenetic and free flowing, and has certain debts to Joycean associative allusions, where words are contorted to homophonic or mnemonic spellings that usually have some kind of double entendre underneath them. It can be clever, but at a certain point, it feels a bit like we’re just supposed to marvel at this voice and that’s the only reason they’re rendered on the page as such. What’s more, perhaps at first kind of interesting, the style becomes quite obnoxious later on where it has the feeling of a person trying way too hard to sound clever without a wit of cleverness. Perhaps this is purposeful as the novel goes on and Rachel/Helen becomes bored/tired of Alyosha/Ilya.

The pacing of the novel is non-existent, it decides to throw in plots, intrigues, ideas that all lead essentially no where every 50-100 pages. It’s hard to understand the throughline we’re supposed to follow and often times makes you feel like you have nothing at stake in reading the novel—it’s going nowhere, so what’s there to actually care about?

At the end of the day, I did feel like DeWitt was approaching some of the highs of The Last Samurai in here, with similar plays of language and foreign language, but what it lacks that TLS has is the strength of its characters and, as YNH itself points out, not much in terms of plot-driven ideas, like a MacGuffin (which TLS does employ to great success). The book needed something to wrap around and shoot through, something we can hang onto as readers to keep engaged with the various strands, threads, false starts, fake outs, double-layerings, etc.

Scrolling through the reviews for the book, there’s a lot of love/hate dichotomy, but a theme emerges: it’s chaotic as hell, and fun, but is it successful? I had a lot of fun with it and found it to be unlike anything I’ve read before, but by the same turn, it’s a hard one to recommend.

[birdbassador · Rating 3 out of 5]

look i knew going into it that things wouldn't really gel or anything, and it was very funny that there were cliff bleszinski epigraphs and language puzzles, and i would periodically mention some of the funnier/droller bits to whoever was interested. but:
1) i think merely pointing out that you're doing an "if on a winter's night a traveler" shtick but not as well doesn't absolve you from the fact that you're doing an "if on a winter's night a traveler" shtick but not as well.
2) there was a point very near the end where there are quotes from wikipedia articles about macguffins etc. and i had almost a cold sweat premonition that she was going to mention the tv tropes website. thank g-d this did not happen, but the fact that it very well could have drives the star ranking down to 3.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bideo review to follow

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Conflicted

[Wiley Kohler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! It’s like repeatedly reading the New York Times for 20 minutes, then scrolling on Instagram for 20 minutes, then spending 5 minutes looking at your screen time in shame, and then turning off your phone for 15 minutes. I don’t know if it’s anything more than the sum of its parts, but I also don’t know that it’s trying to be. I thoroughly enjoyed but if someone told me they hated it I could easily empathize.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an experience. It's a book within a book within multiple books. Parts are written in first person, in second person, and in third person. The major points are, as I understand them: if people around the world are fascinated by and have made a point to learn Klingon, Ent, and other fictional languages (mostly from sci-fi), why can't we make it just as interesting for Westerners to learn Arabic or other seemingly impenetrable languages (Hebrew, Russian, Greek, etc.)? Today's University education is so expensive that some students must turn to prostitution to pay their bills. Arabic: we should all learn Arabic and then perhaps fewer wars would happen. Luck is not random: we are all lucky to be alive and should be happy for the luck in our lives. Luck is random but you have to play the lottery to win.
The book is full of references to Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler," which has clearly influenced this experimental novel. Both include more than one narrator and both reflect on the difficulties of writing. #Your Name Here is chock full of name droppings and titles-of-books droppings. There are multiple email exchanges and multiple flights to multiple countries. Throughout it, you are on page x of "Your Name Here."
If you are up for a journey with no apparent destination (other than publication), and don't mind absurdism, give it a try. Excellent narration for a single narrator. Two narrators of different genders would have made following the story too easy (read: accessible) for the audiobook listener, I suppose?
My thanks to the author, publisher, @BrillianceAudio, and #NetGalley for early access to the audiobook for review purposes. Publication date: 28 October 2025.

[Vincent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I love DeWitt's style as always, I did have a harder time with this book than I did with The Last Samurai (which is saying something since I did have to read that five times to start to feel like I really had a good grasp on some of the trickier details of that book). I might up my rating to 5/5 at a second reading... but that might have to wait some time as it took me quite long to finish it the first time. Still 4/5 is not bad, and I could recommend it to anyone who has first enjoyed another of her books.

[Zachary Swann · Rating 3 out of 5]

can you love a 3-star book?
Your Name Here is a strange and taxing read: almost no plot to speak of, 3 or 4 or 5 distinct stories that also overlap thematically, pages and pages of email correspondence.

there is certainly thematic glue to hold it all together, but I don’t feel particularly rewarded for reading it.

that being said, Dewitt is reliably funny and her particularity and oddness are truly a treasure I will always show up for.

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills)]

My reel:
#DeWittGridneff25 #YourNameHere
#HelenDeWitt & #IlyaGridneff #readinganactofsharedsolitude #paperpills🇵🇸❤️ #beedoubleokayess📚🐦 #reemreel #athingofbeauty
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSSx73...

[luke · Rating 1 out of 5]

I loved the last samurai but I think this one is too self-consciously meta and there really isn’t anything to follow :/

[Ethan Philion · Rating 3 out of 5]

I of course want to love this so badly and at times I did. There are a lot of moments that are entertaining, when DeWitt’s prose really gets flowing there’s no one like her and I’m thrilled to be reading it. But the last third gets so unbelievably monotonous. In general, the more Ilya Gridneff or what I assume is Ilya gridneff there is the less I liked what was happening. I love the anger in all of DeWitt’s work and it’s very present in this one. But the anger, however justified and especially with the publishing industry, also contributes to feeling like it isn’t so much a novel, it’s missing that crucial transformation of emotion into something greater.
Many things cut through the things that didn’t work for me:
-The descriptions of suicide and really the months after suicide attempts, clearly autobiographical, are so emotive, you really feel the exhaustion of the character.
-the description of DeWitt’s stand-in of being just a body out of sentences is such an evocative description of depression/fatigue.
-in general the Lottoland book insert worked for me. Very funny and also some of the most classic Dewitt language in the book.
-the general “what are we gonna do to have money” feeling that pervades the book holds it together just enough. So may of the characters spend long parts of their stories just wondering when the money they are owed will arrive and wondering what to do until that money arrives. It made me really feel for DeWitt who I think is amazing and has been so thoroughly let dow by the publishing industry.
-the second person sections pretty much all worked for me. Glad I read If On A Winter Night A Traveler last year.
-this made me watch some Fellini and that rocked.
-the arabic material early on was both funny and thoughtful, I loved the sections of the character trying to convince the CIA that they should be funding a LOTR like book for Arabic and the references to people seeing well known books with little parts in Arabic made me laugh.
-the scraps of early internet email language at the bottom of the emails were funny.
-the personal add Jocasta seeks Oedipius is hilarious

[Andrew Lambright · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much going on in this book! I enjoy DeWitt’s writing immensely and this experimental work of metafiction is no different. This is an intentionally challenging book to read, but the effort is satisfying. I do feel it’s really about the author dealing with the bewildering and embittering aftermath of the publication of her best-known work, “The Last Samurai”.

This is my first five-star book of 2026!

If I had a nickel for every self-aware metafiction novel I’ve read in the last 6 months, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right?

[Ray Kluender · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF'ing this about 40% of the way through. Dewitt at her best is the very best and there were transcendent bits here (especially given the autobiographical context), but I just can't continue to wade through the bogs of the fictionalized email exchanges and Lotteryland excerpts. Anytime I start to enjoy myself, there's a chapter that's almost gleefully antagonistic to the reader. If that's the point that's neat, but I'm tapping out.

[Hattie Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel like everyone I know will hate this book but I loved it and I love when authors get real weird with it.