Volume 48, Number 14 · September 20, 2001
Boy Wonder
By Daniel Mendelsohn
The Last Samurai
by Helen DeWitt
Talk Miramax/Hyperion, 544 pp., $14.95 (paper)
A third of the way into Helen DeWitt's remarkable first novel, a book that is populated with geniuses of various sorts, there's an extended description of the aesthetic philosophy of a young Japanese pianist named Kenzo Yamamoto, a reclusive former child prodigy whose concert career has not flourished—possibly because at a typical evening at Wigmore Hall he might play Chopin's Op. 10 No. 1 Ballade in D minor again and again for seven and a half hours, each time accompanied by a different noise ('a bell or an electric drill or once even a bagpipe'). By this point in The Last Samurai—which is about one genius in particular, a boy named Ludo Newman, and his mad mother, who may also be a genius, and his search for a father—the reader won't bat an eye, having been exposed to extended descriptions of all kinds of esoterica: turn-of-the-century Homeric textual criticism, say, or number theory, or Japanese syllabaries, or Alexandrian literary criticism, or Schoenberg's Harmonielehre, or interpretative approaches to Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which gives the novel its title and scenes of which are quoted verbatim over and over again throughout.
Review, 4305 words
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