“The Last Samurai” by Helen DeWitt

DeWitt had originally intended for the title of this book to be “The Seven Samurai” and interspersed throughout the novel you read excerpted scenes of Kurosawa’s classic, relayed by the characters. The two main characters are an Oxford-educated American single mom, struggling to make it financially, in early 1990’s London and her precocious young son, Ludo. The narrative begins with the mother, but soon rotates between the two. She has unorthodox child-rearing habits, which include teaching the child ancient Greek at age four ala James Mill, riding the Tube around in loops while studying to avoid paying the heating bill at her flat, and sitting in the National Portrait Gallery reading books all day. The child becomes quite the linguist and polymath, but eventually wants to find out who his father is. This is something his mother refuses. She feels that watching and re-watching “The Seven Samurai” will imbue the child with enough of the manly qualities. Without giving away much, the father’s identity turns out to be a disappointment to the boy and he starts a quest to find a better dad from semi-famous literati, academics, and artists in the London scene. The book is at once poignant and hilarious. Not having a kid myself, I imagine it to be a fine child-rearing manual in its own way- with do’s and don’ts aplenty. The quality of writing is superb throughout and the amount of research to include the level of detail in the book is tremendous. DeWitt studied classics at Oxford herself and so the book is littered with references to Homer and Lucretius. There is a short digression into the best way to teach a child ancient Greek, complete with practice exercises in Greek script, and a shorter digression into Japanese Kanji characters that fill up a page of text. She intersperses Arabic, Hebrew, French, and Italian- all without it feeling contrived. The pace is fast, as you journey with the boy and his mother through his adolescence as he tries to find some semblance of normality in a world he doesn’t quite fit into or understand. Typical of the boy’s adventures around London was this, “I could try the hunchbacked midget costume I had to wear when we went to see The Crying Game- but I thought I might have trouble getting into a bar even as a midget sensitive about his height.” More seriously, you can sense the anger and frustration in DeWitt’s prose amidst the humor. It is an anger at the conventional, anger at academia, anger at the publishing industry, and anger at those institutions deemed to be the modern sanctifiers of taste. As DeWitt writes in an afterward, “it’s much harder to imagine what one might have been with better chances, greater challenges. Since there is no age at which the opportunities offered Ludo are the norm, we don’t know whether he was a genius or not- only that he is an oddity in a society with very low expectations.”