Your Name Here - Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff

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Your Name Here

by
Helen DeWitt
and
Ilya Gridneff

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the authors

Title:	Your Name Here
Authors:	Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff
Genre:	Novel
Written:	(2025)
Length:	608 pages
Availability:	Your Name Here - US
	Your Name Here - UK
	Your Name Here - Canada
	from: Bookshop.org (US)

	directly from: Dalkey Archive Press

A version of this novel was completed around 2005 and available as a pdf from Helen DeWitt's website.

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Our Assessment:

B+ : a challenging odd heap of a book

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
London Rev. of Books	.	11/9/2008	Jenny Turner
The Telegraph	A-	5/12/2025	Gabrielle Schwarz
TLS	.	17/10/2025	Norma Clarke

From the Reviews:

"The best and funniest ideas in the book involve the duo’s plans for diffusing Arabic throughout the notoriously obdurate medium of English-language culture (...) By choosing not to impose a traditional artificial finish on the ‘reality’ you see around you, you risk giving up on one of the main art-carrots: how the hell can anyone, reader or writer, get through a book without a clear narrative line ?. (...) How can you be sure, though, that what you are left with is not merely charmless and cold ? The Arabic apart, Your Name Here does not have the clarity and exuberance of The Last Samurai. (...) I’ve read it three times now, and some of the patterns are clear to me, and there are others I sense but don’t quite get -- partly because bits of it don’t work." - Jenny Turner, London Review of Books

"(A) thrillingly strange 600-page novel-within-a-novel-within-a-novel (.....) Really, this is a book about the process of its own creation. (...) It’s all oddly gripping -- especially if, like me, you’re the kind of person who is tantalised by the prospect of peering into a stranger’s inbox. (...) At times, especially with the constant switches in perspective, you have no idea what’s going on. But things do become clearer as you familiarise yourself with the narrative voices, which are all vividly distinct. The running gags also help -- DeWitt and Gridneff are masters of comedic repetition." - Gabrielle Schwarz, The Telegraph

"It is hard to know who has written what, and what is part of the fiction, or metafiction. The frequent reminders that there is no plot are restful: no keeping up is required. (...) I did enjoy this book, and it is 2FC2E. No matter. It isn't asking to be explained. It's an advertisement for itself. (...) This is hit-and-run, take-no-prisoners writing. It is at once smart-ass and abject." - Norma Clarke, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

Well into Your Name Here Rachel Zozanian -- Helen DeWitt stand-in cum alter ego (though DeWitt also figures in the novel) and reclusive author of "the cult classic Lotteryland" -- e-mails the Ilya Gridneff-stand-in/alter ego (here calling himself Mischa Kropotkin, though more often appearing as A.P.Pechorin (after A Hero of Our Time) -- and occasionally under other names) and suggests:

look, here's an idea. let's do a book together. your e-mails plus my oxford hustlers, was denkst du ?

Zozanian has been impressed by Pechorin/Kropotkin's e-mails and one of the plotlines of the novel has her trying to get him a publishing deal, trying to convince her former editor that he's: "the next Hunter Thompson". Zozanian/DeWitt knows from experience that: "It's bad, very bad to deal with the biz but it has to be done"; Pechorin is somewhat ambivalent (the editor: "emailed back saying send more stuff but i would prefer a slightly more formal outlook- something a little firmer than show me show me...") but goes for the idea of a collaborative work.
A book does emerge -- with, so the Publishers Weekly report included near the end of the book, a bidding war breaking out: "over the rights to Hustlers, by Kaplan Thornhill and Rachel Zozanian " -- but there's also the book the reader holds in their hands, Your Name Here. As Gridneff e-mailed DeWitt earlier: "To be fair, this book is just one big macguffin after another". Books (or at least excerpts) are nestled within books (Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller is repeatedly invoked), and readers are certainly kept guessing as to what they are reading -- not least because, as the title already suggests, 'you' also figure in it, with sections written in the second person describing actions involving the reader ("You pick up Your Name Here") and commenting on the reading-experience along the way. Okay, so the 'you' is not always one readers can readily identify with -- "You flew first class to Paris because you're a hot shot" -- but elsewhere, as they're reading, many readers might find that many of these second-person bits aren't far off: so, for example, some halfway through:

You're reading Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt. You're extremely aggrieved. Instead of the wealth of stories you loved in the last book there are narrative strands which you find hard to follow.

And soon enough, on page 291:

You're up to page 291 of Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt. What's going on ? Where is this going ? What is your character supposed to be doing ? What is the book actually about ?

As this suggests, there are no easy answers to these questions -- not then, not later (on page 475: "You're on page 475 and you still have no idea what's going on"). And the authors -- real and fictional -- seem to go with the same flow: "Any idea of how you see this developing ?" Kropotkin e-mails Zozanian well into the whole back and forth .....
So, much of the novel is about writing a book -- this book, or Hustlers --, freewheeling e-mail exchanges, with Zozanian seeing great potential in Kropotkin/Pechorin/etc.'s e-mails (not just to her but also to others -- though matters are complicated because he apparently doesn't save his e-mails). The business -- publishing, in particular, but also entertainment more generally with its star-system, -- also gets the treatment. Zozanian has been through this particular wringer with her cult classic Lotteryland (just as DeWitt has with The Last Samurai -- and also with (the actual) Your Name Here, which, after all, was floating around in some form (download the pdf from the author's website ! ...) for some two decades before being picked up by a publisher ...), while her collaborator doesn't quite get it:

He doesn't understand. He reads Miller, Mailer, Joyce, Bukowski, Fante, Bataille, he reads Celine's Voyage to the End of the Night, he reads Genet, he reads Burroughs, he read's Krapp's Last Tape, why can't he find a publisher who publishes the kind of book he reads. Every single book he reads is a published book.

There are sections of e-mail exchanges throughout, many of them focusing on working on a/the novel -- including Gridneff suggesting to DeWitt:

This is flittery, perhaps i could finish your name here ? if you are fed up and have to move on to other matters then perhaps ilya/alyosha could arrive in Berlin, maybe there is a struggle-dispute-dramatix device and i take Baby to fill in the holes. This seems in the original adaption spirit

Among the idea the authors play with is working Arabic into the text, teaching readers the languages by example (complete with Arabic-script writing, letters highlighted in red to familiarize readers with pronunciation) along the way; among the inspired ideas and reasoning offered is:

Imagine a book doing for Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Kurdish, Azeri, Armenian, Uyghur, Urdu, Pashtu, Mandarin, Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew and and and what The Lord of the Rings did for Quenya, Sindarin, Telerin, Doriathrin, Nandorin, Adûnaic, Khuzdul, the Black Speech, Westron, Orcish, Entish and and and and and.

       Envisioned is: "the book of an alter-Tolkien, creating desire for the languages of the Middle East rather than Middle-earth". A laudable idea -- not least because, as is also noted, for example: "once you know one Turkic language you can make yourself understood in all kinds of odd corners of the world. It comes in handy" -- but the book can't quite give sufficient space to all these ambitions, falling short here (you'll only pick up so much Arabic ...), as it also does in other respects -- but then no small part of the story (or stories) is about failure, in its various forms, and falling short, so this too is entirely appropriate.
       Lotteryland also figures here -- including at a point where: "You've heard that Lotteryland, by the reclusive misanthropic Zozanian, is funny. You think you should be reading Lotteryland instead" -- , with sections apparently from it interspersed in the novel, the section-headings anagrams of 'lotteryland'. One of these chapters begins: "We're not saying this is for everyone" -- which can also be seen as applying to Your Name Here as a whole and various of its parts .....
       And there are also those second-person turns -- because:

No one has ever done a book that combines the traditional first and third with the pathbreaking second, let alone the pathbreaking American second with he pathbreaking European second; this is not about egos, it's not about who gets a bigger trailer, it's about pushing boundaries.

       Certainly, Your Name Here does that. The bits of narrative are mostly straightforward enough, but there's considerable variety -- including layers of identity (including 'you') -- and jumble. There's a basic chronological progression, but with so many different bits swirling about that provides only limited hold -- and among the basic exchanges, between DeWitt and Gridneff, already early in the novel we find e-mails from what amounts to, time-wise, the 'end' of the story, in the fall of 2006 (mentioning also this: "fact/fiction which we are unravelling", which indeed unravels right from the start and to the end ...).
       There are many digressions and asides -- many on similar themes, publishing, the star system, languages, scholarship and academia, among others. There are some very good riffs here, such as a quick take on resources such as the Perseus Digital Library -- marvelous on the one hand, but it should never be forgotten that: "There are, however, a few gnats in the Coppertone". (This section concludes with the sensible reminder regarding especially things online: "you always need to know enough to know when you're being lied to".)
       Layered, twisting in and around itself, Your Name Here sprawls all over. It's far from a traditional novel, but remains also rooted in tradition, referencing much other literature (and film), while also including sections of the modern epistolary sort (e-mail exchanges). Readers -- 'you' -- will be tossed and turned (and addressed), and likely remain baffled about a fair amount about and in this novel, but for those willing to put up with the strange ride it certainly offers a variety of rewards.
       While occasionally frustrating, Your Name Here is (far) more engaging -- in every sense -- than most contemporary fiction, the reading experience perforce an active one. It might throw you, but it's worth a try.

- M.A.Orthofer, 5 November 2025

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Links:

Your Name Here:

Dalkey Archive Press publicity page
Excerpt

Reviews:

Helen DeWitt:

Official site

Ilya Gridneff:

Official site

Other books by Helen DeWitt under review:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Contemporary American fiction

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About the Authors:

American author Helen DeWitt was born in 1957.

Australian journalist Ilya Gridneff was born in 1979. He currently writes for the Financial Times.

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