Helen DeWitt is arguably the first of many great, under-rated novelists of the 21^st century. While the newest crop of writers inevitably fails to produce fulfilling harvests (too young, too inexperienced, etc), DeWitt’s first novel has the maturity of the work of a master at her zenith. Given stellar reviews when first released, the book has now faded into the background. No one speaks of it anymore; yet there is still much to be spoken of. It was like a comet screeching across the sky and then disappearing into the darkness    

If Anthony Burgess, in his multi-linguistic prolificacy, had written a book based so much around translation and misunderstandings from language to language and person to person, this would be the result. Add to this philosophic/linguistic stew a young prodigy (think of Encyclopedia Brown with a working knowledge of ancient Greek and fifty additional IQ points) and a single mother living in 1990’s London to the mix, and you have this delightful work of fiction.

The book runs on so many levels (including the repeated viewing of and quoting from Kurosawa’s masterpiece The Seven Samurai) that, at times, it is difficult to tell who is narrating the story, much less what is taking place. However, DeWitt has hidden clues through the text; so that seemingly unconnected threads connect by the last page.

Young Ludo and his mother Sibylla live on the edge of poverty in a run-down house in London. Sibylla makes her living by typing old special interest magazines (lots to do with knitting and fishing) into computer databases from their house. She home-schools Ludo, teaching him various subjects which many other characters in the book consider to be beyond a child of his age. Both the mother and the child are clearly intelligent beyond their years and both are socially maladjusted enough to make their characters realistic—flawed but still enjoyable. They have both been given the emotional range to be capable of both comic relief and dramatic escalation.

Growing up fatherless, Ludo leans entirely on his mother. Sibylla doesn’t seem to have a life of her own, as much as she would like one. Once Ludo is old enough to tell the reader his own story, the main narrative voice shifts from Sibylla to Ludo. Sibylla then becomes an increasingly cloistered individual, becoming more unstable as the book progresses. It is as though the reader was her only confidant, and now that the reader is busy listening to another character’s story, she is at a loose end with no one to talk to, retreating into herself with a self-destructive reclusiveness.

Eventually, Ludo decides to go in search for his father. His mother lets very few clues about his father slip through her self-censoring lips. Being a genius, he is able to decipher who his father is from the meager evidence she passes him.

Still longing for a father-figure, however, Ludo decides to go in search of men whom he could pretend are his father. The result is uproarious and terrifying at the same time. The emotional impact of the mother and son; father and son connection shines through DeWitt’s electric prose, channeled through the structure of The Seven Samurai.

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At the heart of DeWitt’s novel is the search for family connections, both biological and emotional. The characters wander through the pages, looking for someone to connect to. There is the connection between father and daughter, (briefly) between man and woman, mother and son, (briefly) between son and father; later between the son and the father-figure. In this sense, the novel is a traditionalist work in the rubric of American prose. However, the genius of DeWitt’s novel comes from the genius of her characters. The characters, however sympathetic or unsympathetic they are, all have an air of intelligence about them without becoming stuck-up or the butt of the many jokes that run through the book. DeWitt knows how to write from the perspective of an intelligent person without condescending and vain cheap shots.

The originality of the book, the connection between the seemingly unconnected, the wordplay and ménage of intellectual substances littered through the book, displayed and personified by the characters makes me look forward to another novel by Helen DeWitt, in the same way that I look forward to an unread Nabokov novel.