“Some Trick” by Helen DeWitt

This is a collection of short stories. DeWitt’s stories are ostensibly unrelated, but many focus on the themes of writing, artistic creation and integrity, and the business side of art. Being DeWitt, she throws in more than a few references to philosophy, mathematics, and the classics, as well as inserting her biting wit often. She comments of one character, “he wore a suit because hacks must dig for dirt in a suit.” Philosophizing on death, she has another character pontificate, “Nobody thinks God actually died: they think it was never alive in the first place.” Another character comments on the Japanese aesthetic, “haiku- it is an art of subtraction, an art with a horror of the extraneous, but it’s not so much that it has a horror of the extraneous as that it avoids histrionics, Western art gives the impression by contrast of being saturated with sincerity.” Not many characters in this collection are likable. Many seem to be trying too hard. Most are pompous, pedantic, and/or money grubbing. A few are memorable in their outrageousness. The depictions of the creative world DeWitt chose to display in this collection are of a most unflattering light.