Songs about Books: The Third Book

Joshua Morrison gets another favorite of mine: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. Readers of this book have to overcome a pair of misfortunes in order to discover what a gem it is: First of all, they have to care enough to notice that it bears absolutely no relation to the Tom Cruise white-man-as-savior-of-Japanese-culture movie of the same name.

Second, they have to read the plot description on the back jacket and discover that it’s a book about a genius mother who is raising her son alone. In place of a father figure, she shows her son Akira Kurosawa’s film The Seven Samurai over and over again.  One day, the son goes out to find his father. Of course, there are seven candidates. When I was a bookseller, I would tell customers again and again that they don’t have to have seen The Seven Samurai to enjoy the book; in fact, I hadn’t seen the movie when I first read the book and it didn’t interfere with my enjoyment at all. (I didn’t tell the customers that I felt compelled to watch the film right after reading the book, and then I read the book again after watching the film and enjoyed them both even more that way.)But those two hurdles were enough to chase away the readers it deserves. I dislike the term, but it’s a cult novel, and it deserves a much larger audience.

Genius is a hard thing to write convincingly. DeWitt ranks right up there with Nabokov and David Foster Wallace in terms of creating convincing characters who are geniuses. Like those other two authors, she has the distinct advantage of actually being a genius herself. The characters in this book are so finely drawn, so believable, that you get drawn in emotionally and intellectually. Then it takes over your brain and opens up new pathways inside of you and then you’re a different person than you were when you started reading it.