Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai (no relation to the mediocre movie) is an erudite, silkily written book that is alternately enthralling and stultifying. The book is about an eccentric single mother, Sibylla, whose only child, Ludo, is a genius. Sibylla raises the six-year-old Ludo in the style of John Stuart Mill, flooding him with multiple languages, advanced science, and books well beyond his age. Ludo absorbs them all instantly. But despite his vast intelligence, Ludo begins to feel a pressing need for the simple pleasures of a father; and, basing his quest on Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, with which both he and his mother are obsessed, he embarks on a search for a man to call his dad.

Two things about The Last Samurai stand out immediately. The first is its funky, experimental style. The entire book is written like an internal monologue, with only slightly more structure than a stream-of-consciousness narrative. For a typical example, take this paragraph from p. 364, which I quote verbatim:

Sib was saying All I'm saying is if we imagine setting up a society with no knowledge of the place we are to occupy, we are highly UNLIKELY to sentence ourselves to 16 odd years' absolute economic dependence upon persons of whose rationality there can be no guarantee, and highly LIKELY to stipulate a society in which

Yes, the actual paragraph ends on this sudden break; the capital letters are also all sic. The rhythm of DeWitt's narrative voice does become seductive, and there are a few luminous passages that would be unattainable without this free-form style. But, for the most part, I found this just aggravating. Too often, it felt artificial and undisciplined, disconnected from the ultimate purpose of this special voice. I admit that I do place the burden on authors to justify any writing more offbeat than, say, Hemingway's, but I think I'm justified in doing so.

The second notable thing about The Last Samurai is its enormous erudition. DeWitt throws out passages in multiple languages (including Japanese, ancient Greek, and, weirdly, Icelandic), ruminates on advanced physics, and engages in exhaustive analysis of The Seven Samurai. It's all very impressive, and it provides a good simulation of Ludo's curious education. But at times I felt that DeWitt had become enamored with her own learning, with some very long expository passages that, to me, didn't advance the book at all. Admittedly, the individual digressions were quite interesting in their own right, but they distracted from the rest of the story.

What saves this novel from total mediocrity is the surprising power of some of its individual chapters. Ludo's interactions with each father candidate are amusing, terrifying, and sad. The penultimate chapter, involving the fictional adventurer Red Devlin, is an absolute masterpiece.

Also interesting is Ludo's growing awareness of his mother's weirdness. The novel effectively conveys a young boy's innate trust in his mother, and his dawning awareness that perhaps his mother's foibles (which have found such a powerful mirror in him) are more than mere eccentricities. There is a dialogue sequence near the end of the novel where Ludo desperately questions one of his father candidates about a hypothetical woman whom he wishes to help. The hypothetical woman is clearly his mother; and Ludo's simple but penetrating questions are a heartbreaking window into the fears that he has kept bottled in.

Like Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, The Last Samurai's individual components are more compelling than the book as a whole. But whereas The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles was one continuous sequence of stunningly powerful vignettes, The Last Samurai's highs are somewhat fewer and further between. The book makes some important and insightful points about childhood, family, and the emotional emptiness of intellectualism. But there's a lot of blathering in there too.

Copyright © 2005 Steven Wu