Hailed a "Best Book of the Year" by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Vulture,
and the New York Public Library
Finalist for the 2019 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no
author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the
funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points
might be statistics, romance, the art world's piranha tank, games of
chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success.
"Look," a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably
enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals,
situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube
Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove "more complicated than
they had first appeared" and "at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to
attenuate." In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt's signature
poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the
mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so
sadly "taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say
impedimental, to ratiocination."
