San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Freedom — at a price
The artist-characters in “Some Trick,” Helen DeWitt’s new collection of bitingly hilarious stories, discover that integrity and commercial success are incompatible, or at most a fluke that can’t be replicated without sacrificing one’s sanity and/or soul.
Take Peter, math whiz and author of a best-selling children’s book about robots. For the follow-up, all he wants is a publisher sympathetic to his vision. Peter proposes they offer the book only to a fervent admirer of Bertrand Russell, in which case he’ll reverse the commission, giving the agent 85 percent. The agent responds as if Peter has proposed doing something naughty with the hors d’oeuvres.
DeWitt has had her own well-documented entanglements with the publishing world. It’s maddening that the author of two of the funniest and most thought-provoking novels of the century so far, “The Last Samurai” (2000) and “Lightning Rods” (2012), is so under-published.
While not all of the stories in “Some Trick” concern artists, the arts invariably play a pivotal role. In “Improvisation Is the Heart of Music,” perhaps my favorite, DeWitt uses music — first metaphorically, then for real — to convey the debasement of a marriage.
Maria is startled to discover that her husband’s obnoxious “habit of modulating out of dialogue into anecdote” is not some spontaneous tic but, rather, a “mechanical repetition” that is “something quite other and alarming.” DeWitt depicts the couple’s fundamental incompatibility through the metaphor of
Some Trick
Thirteen Stories music: “Repetition disturbed Maria; it was like trying to play jazz with someone who has the sheet music for ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ and works it in whenever he can.” There can be no doubt whose side DeWitt favors.
At the story’s close, washing dishes after another predictable dinner party, Maria softly sings to herself “When the Saints Come Marching In.” Her husband joins her and the song’s chorus reappears, this time in manic all-caps, before the narrator takes over and repeats the words once more. It’s the perfect choice: a once-great song now burdened by cliche, whose performative cheerfulness belies lyrics that are, after all, apocalyptic. Till death do us part indeed.
DeWitt’s prose itself suggests improvisation’s blissful illusion of freedom. What a delight to have her back. Here’s hoping another novel’s on the way — and soon.
Gregory Leon Miller, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, teaches for the University Writing Program at UC Davis. Email: books@sfchronicle.com