Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff.Supplied
- Title: Your Name Here
- Author: Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Deep Vellum, Dalkey Archive Press
- Pages: 608
From: Randy Boyagoda <OndaatjeJr76@AOL.com>
To: Helen DeWitt <Helen.DeWitt@gmx.net>; Ilya Gridneff <anarchichus@hotmail.com>
Dear Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff,
Please accept this note of admiration about your co-written new novel, Your Name Here, a radical literary project marked by its ambition to be, I think, an almost impossible thing: a genuinely novel novel.
I first came to your work through, respectively, The Last Samurai, Helen’s brilliant 2001 novel about a waspish single mother and her boy-genius son making their way through 1990s London, and Ilya’s excellent journalism, notably his work as the Canada correspondent for the Financial Times of London.
Your Name Here, a metafiction that unfolds in an often vertiginous mix of second- and third-person telling, includes correspondence between the two of you, whether explicitly or through various fictional stand-ins and pseudonyms, about the collaborative writing of Your Name Here. One of Ilya’s recurring concerns in the e-mailed sections of the book is his worry that in the end, he’ll be better known for his sexual adventurism than his literary accomplishments.
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Given the complexity of 'Your Name Here,' author Helen DeWitt said she decided 'to make the impossibility key to the book and use it for comic effect.'MUSTAFAH ABDULAZIZ/The New York Times
In Helen’s response to Ilya’s worry – to help him get published by collaborating on the novel Your Name Here – she comes across as intensely, generously committed to making the implausible plausible, despite the psychological costs. These costs are especially evident in Helen’s main alter-ego in the novel, “the notorious reclusive misanthrope” writer Rachel Zozanian. She’s the author of the cult classic Lotteryland – parts of which also make up Your Name Here, as does a subplot about a filmmaker trying to adapt it for the screen – and is brave and open about her struggles with mental illness.
Indeed, the book includes correspondence about Rachel being a voluntary patient in a “hospital which provides care and treatment for persons with mental illness,” alongside passages in which Rachel describes her perilous mental state to others, many of whom eventually take offence at her bluntness and break ties.
Rachel’s state of mind makes her not want to venture into the world. This also makes her very interested in the besotted, sex-filled doings of a globe-trotting, danger-seeking celebrity-gossip journalist named A.P. Pechorin.
This is Ilya’s main fictional stand-in, who, among other things, writes a tale “from Baghdad to Britney that is a combination of my war machine exploits then pop culture-papparazzi obsession machine.” The tale, which also appears in the book, both entertains and distracts. In so doing, it exposes how our media consumption entertains and distracts us in a morally flattened world of manifold suffering.
As the novel presents it, Rachel and A.P. first meet by chance in a London bar in the early 2000s, which leads to extended e-mailing between them, tracing the almost 20 years Your Name Here took to be published – a route almost as convoluted and circuitous as the storylines in the novel itself – and suggesting an admirable doggedness on Helen’s part.
For his part, Ilya seems to have moved on to other things, less and less hopeful of publication – never mind the million-dollar deal Helen was convinced the two were going to get. I think “resilience” is the more appropriate term for Helen’s efforts, but given the book’s total loathing of passively enjoyed mainstream culture and its terms, something tells me Helen would find that word despicably well-suited to our self-care-and-slop-screen age. As with, probably, my use of the words “brave” and “open” earlier in this e-mail regarding her challenges with mental illness (probably “mental illness” too, sorry!).
The novel includes correspondence between Ilya Gridneff and his co-author DeWitt whether explicitly or through various fictional stand-ins and pseudonyms.MAY TRUONG/The New York Times
But it did finally happen, the book has been published, and the fact that it took this long and that you decided to make the story-of-its-being-published part of the story itself means the book can be read as an acidic satire of writers and their anxieties and ambitions, and also as a caustic running commentary on the publishing industry and its reluctance to bring out difficult books.
You make this point especially sharply with passages about the easy enjoyments afforded by airport novels and/or the works of Anne Tyler, though you also undermine yourself by invoking the many difficult writers whose books have been published to both critical acclaim and popular response – the likes of Italo Calvino, Michel Houellebecq, Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce, among others.
So, what I’m saying is, as sympathetic as I am, find me a writer who’s pleased with the publishing industry (I bet even the author of all those hot new gay hockey novels has complaints!). Eventually, I wanted to hear about something else.
I was in luck given how much else your novel brings up, turns about, plays with, discards and reconsiders. This includes – as just a sample from its 600 pages – the civilizational scandal of how many Westerners devote themselves to learning Tolkien’s invented language, Elvish, as compared to those who try to learn Arabic.
This is a point underscored by the novel’s related, contemporaneously set ruminations on the War on Terror and Iraq War, and also by its including pages designed to help us learn a little Arabic. There’s also lots of writing on film and pop culture, notably Fellini’s 8 ½, in addition to maps, drawings, and pictures of George Clooney and Tom Cruise.
Am I missing anything? Probably, you’d say, I’m missing everything. But I take comfort, regardless, in your brawny, anarchic novel’s repeatedly assuring its readers, “Not to worry, everything’s under control.” Because if Your Name Here gives us a novel under control, then, to borrow an old Catholic joke, give me the Jesuit approach to chastity!
Thanks for reading,
Randy