Beautiful Losing

Josh Billings wonders about Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s new novel “Your Name Here.”

By Josh BillingsOctober 27, 2025

• Fiction

YOU ARE REVIEWING the new novel by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff, Your Name Here, which will be released this week by Dalkey Archive Press. You have decided, after a certain amount of trepidation, to write the review in the second person, which feels gimmicky but hopefully appropriate given that the book’s title and one of its several frame stories is also written in the second person. Why this should make it appropriate is, of course, a fair question. Did the reviewer of Hemingway write in terse declarative sentences? Did the reviewer of Catcher in the Rye write like a 16-year-old boarding school student? No, they did not. So, within one paragraph, you are already regretting having abandoned your staid reviewer’s coach for a vehicle that feels about as dignified as a Wienermobile.

Nevertheless, you soldier on, taking heart from the novel’s own refreshing boldness, which at times during your reading experience has felt like the source of both its particular successes and its overall difficulties. In order to gin up a little gravitas, you decide to touch on the history of second-person fictional narratives, which is brief, and which includes both admitted masterpieces, like Lorrie Moore’s short stories and Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), and more mixed achievements, such as Tom Robbins’s Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994). For a few minutes, you consider not mentioning the last of these authors, whom you frankly love in an embarrassing, unreasonable way that would never make it into the third person. Nevertheless, you decide to keep him in, if only to highlight the playful but sometimes self-protective tone that runs through all these works: as if they were Choose Your Own Adventure books in which the formal feat was always fighting against the suspicion that the book as a whole didn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts.

So, okay, now that you’ve laid some runway, you feel like you can get back to Your Name Here, which is a much better book than Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, but which feels, at times, similarly haunted and frustrated by whimsy. You realize that you have now taken almost three paragraphs to announce an actual opinion about the book—although, to be fair, you think that this is probably related less to your (let’s face it) increasingly unwieldy second-person narration and more to your immense love and respect for Helen DeWitt’s first novel, The Last Samurai (2000). But this isn’t a Helen DeWitt novel; it’s a Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff novel, as you find yourself reminded during the book. And what is a Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff novel? This feels like a more difficult question to answer—especially since the sections that you have found most successful tend to be those in which the novel achieves the kind of miraculous ventriloquism The Last Samurai had in spades:

I first read The Hobbit when I was 9. The library of cast-off paperbacks in a rotting palace in Mardan had nothing else in the series; I moved on to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. My parents (as I then referred to them in my young, naive, unalienated way) were ending a marriage of smashed chandeliers, airborne dinner services, grand pianos hurtling down marble steps to the bottom of swimming pools. I went back to the beginning of The Hobbit. I was given The Lord of the Rings for my 10th birthday; I opened the first page under the doting eyes of stewardesses en route to Dakar, finished it under further dotage two months later on a plane to Rangoon. I went back to the beginning of The Hobbit.

Grand pianos hurtling down marble steps to the bottom of swimming pools—and then, even after having read through that sentence twice, you want to read it again. You want to live in these sentences that show no need to reconcile their contradictions (nerdy charisma, romantic cynicism) but rather build speed like a bullet train flying above its track. Their intelligence is heady, even intoxicating, not just because they rearrange your familiar perceptions in a way that feels almost cinematically pleasurable (one more time: grand pianos hurtling down marble steps to the bottom of swimming pools) but also because their verve seems to promise some eventual coherence: a destination the train will arrive at and where you will discover, finally, the end to which all these hairpin turns have been heading.

It is a wonderful feeling, this promise—in some ways, you think, it is the wonderful feeling of reading a Helen DeWitt novel (although this isn’t a Helen DeWitt novel, as you remind yourself again). And yet, even a fan like yourself has to admit that another interesting thing about Your Name Here is how relentlessly its structure works in the other direction, pushing the book outward toward diffusion, expansion, even drift. Could this be the Gridneff influence? But before jumping to any conclusions, you recall that this is not such an uncommon move in the genre. On the contrary, it is very much in keeping with the history of the novel, which includes many of what Henry James called “baggy monsters” (Moby-Dick? 2666?). So why shouldn’t the authors of Your Name Here do the same thing, refracting their momentum through metafictional layers that include the story of a novelist trying to get her second book written, a science fiction novel about a world based on luck, and the emails of a down-and-out tabloid writer (among others)?

The answer, of course, is that they should—especially since the further you read into Your Name Here, the more you see that the larger story it is trying to tell is of a book failing to be written, of the ingredients refusing to come together. You concede that this is a little precious, but it works, at least for the first two-thirds of the novel. Here, the braiding is bold, building not in spite but because of the cuts, like a montage in an Eisenstein movie. The structure produces opportunities for tension and momentum, winding around a convergence in which everything feels as if it is just around the corner. And yet the strange thing (or maybe not so strange, now that you think about it) is that the longer this suspension continues, the more you begin to feel that this eventual resolution is not being pursued at all but rather actively pushed away, as if the thing being avoided were not confusion, or even boredom, but the disappointment of having to arrive at an ending less brilliant than its glittering components.

You observe, somewhat encouragingly, that this horse-latitudes inertia does not occur everywhere in the book; on the contrary, you submit it is strongest in one particular narrative of Your Name Here—and then maybe it is at this point, unfortunately, that you are going to have to bring up what is really the elephant in the compositional room. Because at the end of the day, a lack of coherence has never really stood in the way of great novels; indeed, in many cases, it has expanded and enhanced them. Similarly, you can imagine a universe in which Your Name Here transcended its “book about trying to write a book” concept by communicating the process of artistic failure so vividly that we forget whether we’re watching Fitzcarraldo lashing his servants, Werner Herzog pushing Klaus Kinski, or just three dozen confused Peruvians shoving a barge over a mountain. But in order to do this, you concede that the book would probably have to contain a lot less of this:

massive human queues at the check point - lazy corrupt police. soldiers sweating with sleek automatic machine guns… officials packing heat in searing heat simply drinking hot tea then rubber stamping in their own time- insullah- was pushed through - an old crazy man hit a younger man with his cane- much laughter as the theatrics melted into realising i’d been pushed through and another melee erupted in the office over crowded over sweating with men whose moustaches thicker than my thigh and wildest dreams of facial hair.

You confess that, now that you are typing it out, the most interesting part of this passage (other than the question of just how much the copyeditor must have hated it) is how bad it is—not bad as in “bad,” which would be survivable and maybe even interesting, but bad. The elbow-in-your-ribs punning (“officials packing heat in searing heat”), the pseudo-Joycean wordplay (“rubber stamping in their own time”), the self-congratulatory clowning (“moustaches thicker than my thigh and wildest dreams of facial hair”): this writing has it all, which is to say it has nothing that it is not willing to shove in your face in a way that makes it practically impossible for you to see, let alone feel, the scene it is describing. In many ways, it’s a pitch-perfect impression of mid-aughts shitposting—the kind you could imagine being spoken by some millennial, can’t-hear-his-own-bullshit Mr. Collins. The only problem with this is that the character writing it—the aforementioned down-and-out tabloid writer, who, for whatever else he may sound like, definitely does not sound like Helen DeWitt—is the dominant voice in the book, one whose brilliance the other characters bring up with a frequency, vehemence, and insanity that veers from mother-praising-her-precocious-child to great-writer-working-overtime-to-convince-herself-that-this-collaboration-is-working:

This was the way of his writing, that even ordinary words went on rampage, the articles and prepositions and conjunctions that sulk at the back of sentences. Perhaps it’s a madman, someone who breaks into pet shops and laboratories and circuses, and now there are chinchillas and gerbils at large, there are rhesus monkeys missing a kidney or frontal lobe, there are blind rabbits and beagles with weeping sores, there are tumorous mice, rats and guinea pigs in their hundreds of thousands, and then there are the beasts with their party tricks, the unicycling elephants, the parasol-twirling bears, the tigers that leap through rings of fire, there are the monsters, the machines, the succubi, the griffons and basilisks and chimeras and talking toasters, the ventriloquist’s puppets, the chess-playing waffle-irons, the vacuum cleaners that tell fortunes and remember birthdays, there are goldfish and piranhas in the Thames.

Piranhas in the Thames! Beagles with weeping sores! But the irony of the passage (a disastrous one, as you read it now) is how it displays all the virtues it describes—virtues that are completely, glaringly lacking in the tabloid writer’s sections. Reading it over again, you get the feeling of control: not stagnant ventriloquism but a water-dancer poise so keyed to the reader’s desire that it conveys the paradoxical but wonderful feeling of being both released and considered. The energy balances perfectly, which is breathtaking, but which also unfortunately leads you to ask something that you realize you have been asking over and over again while reading Your Name Here—which, boiled down, is basically: if you can “fail” this beautifully, then why hand the reins of your novel to a character (real? imagined via some post-Nabokovian brain fart?) whose writing has the same relation to the best passages of Your Name Here as an actual living room has to a movie set?

You have no way of answering this, of course, so you appear to be right back where you started, in the usual reviewer’s situation of having to connect the separate failures and successes of Your Name Here into a single, sensemaking story. It is a situation that you are surprised to find the novel ending up in too—for, by the time you get to the last pages, the surprise the book delivers is really that, despite all the apparent chaos and variety of its strands, the larger narrative appears to be working out exactly as its authors planned. The “book” being written by the tabloid journalist and the struggling novelist has failed, which means the actual book turduckened around it has succeeded. The experiment has paid off the way it was supposed to—which is great on an architectural level, you guess, but disappointing as a reading experience, since what you’ve really been waiting for this whole time is a transformation: the moment (which comes in even the baggiest of great novels) when the intensity, or mass, or just plain insanity of the book pushes it beyond its own terms and into a place of real discovery.

You confess that, despite many vivid moments, Your Name Here never really achieves this kind of alchemy; on the contrary, it remains what it is: a quirky but ultimately untransfigured story, which “works” in all the ways you might expect it to without ever moving into the unexpected. For all its feints at experiment, the collaboration that it delivers is safe, like a star student spending graduation night smoking pot with her neighbor. And who are you to criticize this student, whose brilliance you have seen burning off page after page? But as any good reader knows, when it comes to a great novel, brilliance is not enough. What is missing is something else—something that is not here. To quote Beckett: “Fail again. Fail better.” Or, as the master of failure, Kafka, wrote in his great treatise on literary experiment, “On Parables”:

The first said: You have won.

The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.

The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.