The main character in “Brutto,” the first of 13 stories in Helen DeWitt’s new collection Some Trick, is a painter whose father had once insisted that she apprentice as a dressmaker. After three years, she proved her mastery by making a suit. Years later, when a hustling Italian art impresario named Adelberto visits her studio, he discovers the suit. The narrator says, “It was a suit in a scratchy woolen cloth. It was a dirty mustard brown … It hung on its hanger, this baleful garment that no one would ever wear because of the hatefulness of the cloth and the cut and the straps and the stitching, and all this time the garment had been locked up in a wooden coffin with no one to look at its madness.”
Perceiving brutality in the suit, Adelberto insists, “It’s about the body. Hatred of the body. Denial of the body. The hanging requires the body.” She agrees without apparent enthusiasm or regret to make 20 suits, and to provide a urine sample, a stool sample, and a used tampon to display with the suits, representing the body and artist: “Adelberto did not like it when an image of the artist was used as a sign of the artist.” The suits — and her feces, tears, vomit — become a sensation in Milan, then New York.
At story’s end, her paintings are selling well, too. She is nominated for the Turner Prize. But then, the narrator says, “And maybe you would think that this would be the big chance to show what interests you. But the thing about being an artist is that from the minute you go to art school you realise there is this need to be canny. There is this need to make a name for yourself. There is this need to deal with the people who have the power.”
DeWitt has been a canny and cagey figure in the literary world, as if poking a finger in one of its eyes while performing laser surgery on the other. The rocky publishing histories behind her breakthrough novels The Last Samurai (2000) and Lightning Rods (2011) highlight her stubbornly independent way of executing the art of the deal. In Some Trick, she is a satirist of artists, musicians, writers, publishers and all the rest of us who pronounce opinions about the latest and greatest from the sidelines. But in the next instant, “satirist” doesn’t convey the complexity of her motives at all. “If you have never been there you think it is easy to walk away,” says the speaker of “Brutto” about the offer made to the artist. DeWitt’s writers and artists are divided between making an object that speaks or sees the other side of life – but then allowing this side of life to take over. Here in these stories, DeWitt’s is both comically stuck and capering in the middle.
In a 2013 essay on “The New Writing,” the Argentinian novelist Cesar Aira said that great artists “are not those who created works, but those who created procedures through which works could be made.” If the novel has become congealed and novelists have run out of ways to “exceed its premises,” then Aira will strive to “recuperate the amateur gesture … and restore to art the ease with which it was first produced.” If that sounds ridiculous, Aira simply notes that the avant-garde incorporates ridicule, along with everything else, into itself. And so does DeWitt in her novels and stories. She is another lover of procedure and formulae, especially statistical. There is repetition of pattern, tone, and intention. In DeWitt’s work there is also the ease of chat stylized into her own idiosyncratic sound, a relaxation of rules that welcomes the misrule of the unexpectedly apt or the fragment. The element of chance in the creation of art appears as both topic and law.
Some Trick features several characters who insist on having their own way. Contractual obligations impede gratification. A children’s lit author named Mr. Bergsma wants “a crap-free deal” and a young ex-Iowan named Gil, just arrived in Manhattan and possessed of a midwestern mojo that somehow greases every wheel he encounters, brings his chancy luck to bear. There are literary agents beating the bushes “for the next 2666” (Roberto Bolaño’s novel published by — who else? — New Directions). There is snippy dialogue about Barthes’ notion of “the death of the author” and droll comment: “Theories of authorial absence, says Brian, tend to leave out the curious circumstance that the author is always there to pick up his cheque.” There are some nice bon mots like: “Americans are so natural and friendly and sincere. The Viennese have the mechanical predictable charm of a music box; you don’t have to warm to it.” And there are sudden insights that one takes in and finally assesses as serious: “What is a subtext? You may think of it as a movement in the circumambient language, whose presence you divine by distortions and ripples in the text; what lies between the lines is an invisible, as plain to the eye as the breeze which stirs the leaves of the copper beech in the quadrangle, the high wind that toppled trees in Hyde Park. And we know the disruption is not in one direction only: the text is a kind of windbreak.”
DeWitt’s rapidly unspooling plots are mini-transports for questions about the quiddity of language- and image-culture, the values placed on expression, the weird registers and gauging of self-worth among the books, galleries and their readers and lookers. It is hardly an explicit vibe, but DeWitt seems to be telling us that assigning innovative art production to the margins and allowing articulate nitwits to manage its market results in a great cost to us. Certainly, her artists pay dearly. This vision of the world plays out in dead-panned lines like this: “’Structuralism is out of fashion anyway,’ says Brian, who likes to be a kind of thinking man’s Philistine. He slides a spoon into raspberry sorbet.”
[Published by New Directions on May 29, 2018. 221 pages, $22.95 hardcover]