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, The United States Of America, 21st Century, American, Contemporary, Adult Fiction

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

[Max Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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!

[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

[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.

[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).

[Richard Derus]

One of LitHub's 100 Notable Small Press Books for 2025!
One of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2025!

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bideo review to follow

[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...

[Rendezvouswithbooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the 3rd book of Dewitt that I have read (aiming to read The last Samurai next year) and I am still unsure about what I feel about her. But one thing is for sure that Dewitt is an acquired taste. To love her doesn't come naturally (except in the case of #theenglishunderstandwool which is brilliant and easy to fall in love with). Lighting rods was at the threshold, slippery at times, congenial at others

But Your name here is a step further. It is a very challenging read. Written in Epistolary format where Dewitt is writing letters to her alter ego, journalist Ilya Gridneff, this one is a highly experimental work. A novel within novel, it's a satire which offers a commentary on Art, Politics, Literature, Celebrity culture, War. The way she is hell bent on convincing that Invincible cities is Calvino's masterpiece, not If on a winter's night..,it's hilarious
This book is very American in its approach, while I laughed madly at certain sections, it also limited my understanding of certain others. It often has random repetition of words which sounds needless at times while also creates this hallucinatory rhythm.

I am not going to recommend this as a place to start Dewitt, you definitely would be lost. First test her other works & maybe then try this but with very open mind

Quote

"The point, anyway, is that Oxford was once a place for freaks. (As, of course, was Cambridge.) A freak could sit an examination and win a scholarship for freakish powers — money, that is, buying time to develop the freakish powers. So you can do a set of graphs, and what the graphs show is the evaporation of funding for superheroes. (graphs to come) The habitat disappeared. It had once been possible for a mathematician to win a scholarship covering all expenses by sitting a series of examinations in mathematics and demonstrating excellence in mathematics. It was now necessary to combine excellence in mathematics with skill at fundraising from a kinship system.4 Failing that, some other extra-mathematical skill. Failing that, luck in the Lottery."

[Eloise Knight · Rating 4 out of 5]

A what-even-is-this adventure through a novel/email chain/a different novel/what-even-is-this?/picture book/arabic textbook/&c.&c. Makes me want to watch 8 1/2 with the utmost urgency (which I’ve certainly been wanting to do with an urgency for some time, but until this moment it was not quite utmost). I really enjoyed this book, flying through pages (admittedly many are quite short) when I wasn’t burdened with the burden of finals and all of the other things that interrupted said page-flying. I don’t think the ending quite stuck for me, which sucks because about 10 pages before the ending I was actually quite sure it was going to stick. Still, great fun throughout; I really enjoyed most of the Lotteryland writing; the Oxford bits were super compelling, probably my favorite sections throughout; the emails of Alyosha/Dmitri/Kaplan/Gridneff/&c.&c. were usually quite enjoyable, definitely didn’t hit every time (a shame, because the narrative is quite insistent that it will) but his writing was generally good fun. Definitely (and I think I read that DeWitt agrees) this could’ve benefitted from a significant amount more footnotes, it’s in a weird place where they’re clearly doing a lot of work when they’re around, but there’s only like, 15 or 20? in the whole ~600 book which is so strange! It’s good though, really truly very neat.

[Michael Lin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helen DeWitt is one of those authors whose writing I could read forever, and in Your Name Here, she found a co-author, Ilya Gridneff, whose voice comes from the same postmodern universe. This book takes all those boring, predictable elements of a book, like plot, characters, and setting, and replaces them with a glimpse into the mental world of two endlessly entertaining people, and structure like a house of cards endlessly falling in on itself. The book consists of a stream of fragments of a book within a book within a book, interleaved with an archive of emails from Ilya, including the correspondence between the two authors which led to the creation of the book itself. None of the books within the book are typically structured, with many of them in second person describing you, the reader, as you read the book. It’s all great fun, and in a similar frantic, biting, postmodern voice. I spent the entire book trying to figure out what was happening, until I realized that it was exactly what it is. It’s just not like anything I’ve ever read before. 600 pages flew by, I could have read another 600 and I would still be entertained.

[Salty Swift · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book within a novel within a book, collaborative effort between Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff is a beautiful 600 page mess. A novel that asks many questions such as, why can't I start a sensical book that contains the semblance of a plot? Why is the US government so persistent at killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the Middle East? Why can't we all learn Arabic and be more understanding to those around us? Why does email communication end up in failure? Why can't we all get along in this crazy place? As messy as this plot-free (!?), post-modern work may be, I'd enjoyed being (completely?) lost among the thick woods of these intense, glowing pages, where the authors are establishing a plan for the Great Novel. Huge kudos and two thumbs up!

[Dean P · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I could give this 2.5. I certainly appreciate that she tried. Overall, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who hasn’t read any Dewitt beforehand. It is far too self referential and convoluted for a rookie to enter with this book.

However, you certainly see Dewitt’s talent in certain places. She can be innovative, moving, and funny at her best in this novel. But, I think she may have bit off more than she could chew here. For every great passage, there is another that struggles to justify its purpose.

In any case, I’m happy she tried. We need more books like this and authors/publishers willing to take chances on them.

[Em]

don't have any particularly smart thoughts about this. dewitt's books always make the world feel much bigger and more interesting to me. they also make me feel as if the world could be a much better place than it is.

[LV · Rating 1 out of 5]

DeWitt, pedestrian? Didn’t think I’d live to see the day but here it is.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book is like listening to the Smile sessions

[Neil Fitzgerald]

Setting this aside for now after 100 pages. I was so excited for 3 October releases by 3 authors I'm a fan of, and it looks like they're going 0 for 3.

It's Helen DeWitt, alright: the requisite you-can-literally-just-learn-a-language demonstration, the interest in the arbitrary statistical determination of human lives, the contempt for the publishing industry. But structurally it's complete anarchy, there are at least three layers of narrative, Gridneff's characters (I assume the Alyosha and Pechorin emails are his) keep butting in with missives from the grimy world of London tabloids and substance-fueled benders. It's kind of fun, but at 100 pages the sheer manic energy isn't quite keeping the whole thing afloat for me.

I still recommend everything else by Helen DeWitt, and I will return to this when I'm not in general despair of reading anything I really like ever again.

[Colin · Rating 1 out of 5]

It’s not coherent, or interesting, or moving. Nothing in it resembles a story. I don’t care if that’s “the point”; it’s just not good.

[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.