BOOKS OF THE TIMES; December 11, 2000
By JANET MASLIN
THE LAST SAMURAI
By Helen DeWitt 530 pages.
Talk Miramax Books. $24.95.
Sibylla Newman, a single mother whose 6-year-old son has had no formal education,
decides one day to bring the boy to school. The teacher, Miss Thompson, cordially
advises the boy to try out some building blocks in the classroom. But the boy
wants to talk about his worries that he may not be up to the level of his prospective
classmates. ''Have they read Isocrates' Ad Demonicum?'' he wants to know. ''What
about the Cyropaedia?'' Miss Thompson says she has never heard of these books,
but that her 6-year-old students need not worry about the curriculum, because
people have different abilities and interests, and so they read different things.
The boy replies, ''Well, I have only read the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek
and De Amicitia and Metamorphoses 1-8 in Latin and Moses and the Bullrushes
and Joseph and his Manycolored Coat and Jonah and I Samuel in Hebrew and Kalilah
wa Dimnah and 31 Arabian Nights in Arabic and just Yaortu la Tortue and Babar
and Tintin in French and I have only just started Japanese.'' To place this
list on a more teacher-friendly level, the third book from the last would appear
to be the French version of ''Yertl the Turtle.'' Miss Thompson points out that
children develop at different rates, that what matters is what someone can do
with what he knows and that ''one of the most important parts of school is just
learning to work as a member of a group.'' The boy, serious rather than arrogant,
proceeds to engage her in a debate about John Stuart Mill and then finds her
guilty of fallacious reasoning. It is at this point in the conversation that
Sibylla returns from having spoken with the head of the school and announces
the good news that her son will be able to be enrolled. ''But it looks as though
he won't be in your class.'' '' 'What a shame,' '' Miss Thompson ''regretted,''
writes Helen DeWitt, herself any schoolroom pedant's worst nightmare. In an
exhilaratingly literate and playful first novel punctuated by divine feats of
intellectual gamesmanship, Ms. DeWitt joins Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith and Michael
Chabon in going to the head of this year's class of flamboyantly ambitious novelists
whose adventurousness spins out on an epic scale. And like their books -- ''A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,'' ''White Teeth'' and ''The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,'' respectively -- her ''Last Samurai'' is a sprawling,
aggressively showy book with flashes of genius to keep it soaring. It is possible
to recognize the hubris here without, like Ms. DeWitt's characters, being able
to read that word in Greek or elaborately analyze its derivation. But it's also
possible to be utterly delighted by this author's high-risk undertaking and
her fresh, electrifying talent. ''The Last Samurai'' seemingly centers on the
bond between Sibylla and her son, whom she meant to call Hasdrubal or Rabindranath
or Fabius Cunctator before deciding that Steve or David might be an easier name
for a boy to bear. But it's an exuberantly clever book that can in no way be
mistaken for a standard mother-son story. As a linguist and a classicist, among
her apparently countless other interests and avocations, Ms. DeWitt uses Kurosawa's
''Seven Samurai'' as a means of giving her book a mythic dimension. Because
the boy, who wound up being called Ludo, does not know the identity of his father,
and because Sibylla refuses to tell him, their obsessive habit of watching and
discussing Kurosawa's male-bonding masterpiece becomes central to their lives.
It gives the 11-year-old Ludo a model for how to undertake the search in London
for father figures, even as it turns Ms. DeWitt's book into a display of what
the film scholar Donald Richie has called Kurosawa's predominant theme: ''the
education of the hero.'' What this elaborate premise may obscure is that ''The
Last Samurai,'' in its coolly cerebral way, is so much fun. Anything is possible
on Ms. DeWitt's pages, from eye-chart-like typographical escapades to streams
of numbers being toyed with by Ludo to learning how the subtitles of ''Seven
Samurai'' sanitize its real dialogue. (''What a wonderful language, said Sib,
''they seem to have toned it down quite a bit for the subtitles. I knew 'Japanese
Street Slang' was a bargain at $:6.88.'') Along the way, the reader will also
learn the Icelandic word for seal meat and the precise way (''heptakaiogdoekontapodal'')
to indicate an 87-legged spider, which is a concept Ludo comes up with after
he sketches an 88-legged one and imagines that it got into a fight and lost
a leg. Ms. DeWitt, an American who seems to have written this book as if her
life depended on it and poured vast reserves of inquiring intelligence into
the process, saves her most fanciful efforts for presenting potential candidates
for the role of Ludo's father. She spins enchantingly surreal stories about
the overrated artist, the Nobel laureate, the foreign correspondent and the
bogus consul (''When asked why he had impersonated a member of the Belgian diplomatic
corps he had replied: Well, someone had to'') on the short list of candidates
whom Ludo sequentially discovers. But even as the son looks for a masculine
ideal, the question of paternity is settled early on, as Sibylla describes her
meeting with a writer whose work is so awful that she feels the need to shield
Ludo from it. She went to bed with him mostly to make him stop talking and says
his writing is ''like the Percy Faith Orchestra playing 'Satisfaction.' '' One
day, Sibylla introduces Ludo to some sentimental, really bad writing and really
bad art, then announces: ''You will not be ready to know your father until you
can see what's wrong with these things.'' ''When will that be?'' the boy asks.
''I don't know,'' replies his mother. ''Millions of people have gone to the
grave admiring them.'' Ms. DeWitt herself, on the other hand, warrants admiration
for impeccably good reason.