Helen DeWitt’s novel is a valiant attempt to engage with and explain the challenges of our age in a sprawling, complex set of novels-within-novels that question the place of the novel in a culture defined by asymmetries of information, warfare and power.

Your Name Here is seasoned with excerpts from a correspondence between two writers. One, DeWitt, is a mid-career novelist who despairs at the signs the world has moved on from the novel. She is a language whiz who advocates for the presence of Arabic in a culture that promises war on terror but cannot deliver a pluralist peace. She emails Ilya Grideff, the novel’s real-life Australian co-author, who writes back to her with meditations on the role of story in the digital age. Their correspondence is sprinkled between novellas about a variety of protagonists, and what is real and what is fiction is at times blurred and ambiguous.

DeWitt is one of those singular writers who give literature its messianic quality. The message of her novels is that literature can save, and that she is living proof of someone who has been saved by her literary purpose. Along these lines, DeWitt is a novelist often compared to that other unlikely literary evangelist, David Foster Wallace, whose most famous novel, Infinite Jest, turns 30 this year. They share the conviction that fiction is about what it means to be a human being.

Wallace has been the subject of backlash from readers who have discerned one pronounced gap in his otherwise prescient and note-perfect predictions and evocation of the digital era. This gap is an experience of female alterity, characters who can be defined by a purpose other than discussing other men. The anniversary edition of the novel that predicted Trump, Snapchat, and works like DeWitt’s latest, seems to recognise this, furnishing an introduction by feminist wunderkind Michelle Zauner. Zauner’s Crying in H Mart is one example of the new sensibility towards sad young literary women. DeWitt’s works are another.

DeWitt is an irresistible example of the idiot savant, a term affectionately used to describe someone whose literary gifts are preternatural and accompanied by a struggle with some elements of ordinary life. Her unfinished novels, some of which are an attempt to document these voices, are rumoured to number in the double digits.

The finished works are testaments to the deep understanding that can exist between a reader and their books, even when the rest of the world fails to understand them. Her debut, The Last Samurai, conveys the enchantments, interruptions, and inspirations of a mother to a child prodigy whose mind she tries to quiet by getting him to watch Japanese cinema, which he uses in a search for his real father.

Like Ludo, the child protagonist of The Last Samurai, DeWitt speaks languages dead and alive, and studied them at Oxford before later deciding she was unsuited to academia. The child of diplomats, DeWitt has travelled extensively in Latin America, and her fiction often attests to the quality of being a fish out of water. Her sophomore novel, Lightning Rods, is a satire about the female experience, and arrives at a comic contrivance to separate the life of the mind from the body in its story of colleagues who maintain professional boundaries by having sex through a hole in the wall.

Lightning Rods is as infamous for its publishing history as its imaginative one. It was acquired by the publisher of The Last Samurai, who paid for it without releasing it. It later came out through New Directions, which also published DeWitt’s short story collection Some Trick and a novella, The English Understand Wool. It was only after a nearly two-decade struggle, that the manuscript known to fans as simply “the PDF” saw the light of day as Your Name Here.

The 600-page novel was supported by crowdfunding as well as publications such as the journal n + 1 which ran an extract that helped see it into print. It is a David versus Goliath story about how love of literature can lift people and bring them together. It also avoids the pitfalls of the tragic lone genius motif associated with Wallace by featuring the voice of a co-author, and in this way it mirrors experimental fiction by the Italian collective Wu Ming.

Your Name Here is a matryoshka doll of a book that has been compared to 20th-century Italian novelist Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller. Some of the books within books are self-satirical, such as De Witt’s self-portrayal as Rachel Zozanian, her doppelganger who writes airport bestsellers. But is it a monument or an echo chamber, a classic or condemned? That is for the reader to decide, but in the process, Your Name Here will make your heart larger.

Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff is published by Deep Vellum Publishing ($40).

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