OPINION:
SOME TRICK
By Helen DeWitt
New Directions, $22.95, 197 pages
Helen DeWitt is a writer with an extraordinary breadth of knowledge, a quirky wit, freewheeling style and apparent expertise in fields as diverse as the classics, philosophy, mathematics, art and music. Her recently published book of 13 short stories, “Some Trick,” covers these fields and others. It is a delicious combination of Ionesco’s absurd, Nabokov’s erudite wit and Waugh’s satire, all with an underlying note of anguish. She is both very funny and quite serious.
The plots are not always central to the stories. It’s the underlying ideas, the bizarre nature of the situations, the caustic comments and the unconventionality of the characters that imbue the stories with their unique flavor.
The stories often begin with what appears to be unrelated to the rest of the plot; themes and subplots fly off in tangents but always manage through a circuitous route to connect beginnings and endings. The stories are sprinkled with names, such as Kerry Trengrove, Milman Parry, Deepayan Sarkar, Peter Dijkstra. All are real people, experts in their fields, except for Peter Dijkstra, the Dutch peculiar writer of “Climbers.” There is a Peter Dijkstra, but he is not a writer. He is a well-known Dutch musician.
In the first story, “Brutto,” Nuala, a middle-aged painter, is showing her work at a gallery, when Alberto, an Italian dealer sees an ugly suit that Nuala had made as an apprentice dressmaker long ago in Germany. “[T]he suit hung on its hanger, this baleful garment that no one would ever wear In the white light of the studio the sullen mustard wool, the psychotic stitching, the brutal dowdiness snarled at the world.”
Reluctantly, Nuala agrees to make the 19 suits Alberto wants to exhibit in his Milan gallery. Miuccia Prada buys out the show, which Alberto takes to New York along with samples of Nuala’s bodily fluids to exhibit with the suits. Nuala doesn’t get the money she expected, but she does get the last laugh.
“Remember Me,” begins with Gerald, a cathedral canon who thought it “might be a Good Thing to invite a Jew to participate in the V-E Day service.” Gerald “had never heard of K who was in the running for a Nobel Prize.” The story shifts to K “an Abstract Situationist He stated in interviews that art should concern itself with the operation of the machine He preferred the fixed formulae of the Homeric poems to the polished phrases of Vergil (sic).” After the plot meanders through K’s engagement and marriage, and the successful publication of a new book, K “agreed affably to contribute to a [episcopal] service apiece at Bath and at Wells.”
“The rest was pure Arabian Nights” is the beginning of an oft-repeated anecdote Edward tells about being shipwrecked in “Improvisation is the Heart of Music.” “Edward and Maria were engaged, but without the ease this implies — Maria still found herself struggling to keep up with a companion of such wonderfully polished conversational skills Novelty disturbed Edward 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.” The story satirizes and makes a poignant point about the relationships of marriage.
At the beginning of “Famous Last Word,” “’Structuralism is out of fashion’ says Brian, who likes to be a kind of thinking man’s Philistine. He slides a spoon into raspberry sorbet.” Brian is with a group of friends which includes the narrator and X. After their esoteric discussion about Voltaire and death, X accompanies the narrator home where they sit “at the kitchen table, surrounded by books about deaths of authors” and discuss Rene Pomeau’s biography of Voltaire. “X discussed the deconstruction of teleology and put a hand on [the narrator’s] knee” and then moved the hand up her thigh. X kisses the narrator. “’Let’s go upstairs,’ says X.”
Their discussion continues in the bedroom under more intimate circumstances. “I have mastered subjects and failed to love them. I have looked at the sun and not been blinded. I have dimmed the sun. I will be a lover of the moon,” muses the narrator. Her lover is sometimes called X and sometimes x. When she lays her forehead against x’s skull, she knows “that within that bone and blood, a few centimeters away, plays the music of the spheres.
“[A] painting of a beautiful subject is almost invariably a rotten picture. Guaranteed kitsch,” says Trevor in “Trevor” as he and Lily, an American, are walking in Oxford and discussing what constitutes beauty while the “faintest, merest, tenderest hint of a blush in the sky reminded, with beautiful delicacy, that evening was coming on. ’What about Botticelli’s Venus?’ asks Lily, ’Was Botticelli kitsch?’”
The discussion continues as they move on to Trevor’s rooms. In a mirror, Lily saw reflected “the back of two armchairs, one row of biscuits in a tin, the edge of a teapot in a red cosy, a red-and-brown strip[ed squashy sofa Reflected, framed, the room had charms foreign to the original, just as an ordinary or even ugly object gains beauty and dignity when painted or photographed.”
The stories of “Some Trick” are strange and wonderful, sometimes difficult to follow, but always a delight for the reader in their journey through an original literary mind.
• Corinna Lothar is a Washington writer, critic and frequent contributor to The Times.
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