The Last Samurai (2000) by Helen DeWitt

 Book Review

The Last Samurai (2000)

by Helen DeWitt

 Last month The Atlantic published a 136 Great American Novels list to coincide with a book fair in New Orleans.  The list starts in 1925 with the  The Great Gatsby and it ends last year with Biography of X.  I took a quiz and it said I'd read 70 of them.  I understand the cut-off of 1925, it is pretty normal to call the period from the late 18th through the end of World War I the "long nineteenth century," and picking The Great Gatsby as your starting point establishes 20th century mass-media/celebrity culture as an important boundary line. 

  I paused when I saw The Last Samurai ensconced in the 2000's.   I already had The Last Samurai in my ebook queue at the library after reading her 2022 novella, The English Understand Wool, which I found intoxicating. DeWitt writes with the kind of maximalist elan that has been out of style since David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest became a meme punchline, but personally, I think readers and reviewers are just jealous because most folks just can't keep up with a 500 page novel about a precocious child and his autistic mom or a thousand page novel about tennis.   There is a real audacity to any author/publisher combo that puts out a novel in excess of 450 pages- there are certain genres, fantasy, multi-generational family histories, that regularly exceed that limit, but few within those genres that are taken seriously.  

  I mention that because The Last Samurai is not just a 530 page novel, it is a 530 page debut novel about the relationship between a single mom and her brilliant kid.   After I read and loved The English Understand Wool, I went back and tried to figure out how I missed The Last Samurai for over 20 years.  First answer is that is because no one I know or spoke to mentioned it.  Second answer is probably my own unconscious bias in not thinking that a 530 page novel about a single mom and her child could be utterly brilliant.  I mean, I've read plenty of novels about the difficulty of being a single mom, it sucks, and life is a struggle.  This is not that kind of book about being a single mom.

  Above everything its a linguistic marvel- DeWitt apparently being some sort of language savant-with the text going from Greek to Japanese orthography in the space of a paragraph.   Like I said, I thought it was brilliant.  DeWitt is just too good. And a debut novel! Wow! A Great American Novel, indeed.