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Some trick : thirteen stories / Helen DeWitt.

by Dewitt, Helen, 1957-

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New Directions Publishing Corporation, [2018]

viii, 197 p. : ill. ; 21 cm.

Brutto -- My heart belongs to Bertie -- On the town -- Remember me -- Climbers -- Improvisation is the heart of music -- Famous last words -- The French style of Mlle Matsumoto -- Stolen luck -- In which Nick buys a Harley -- Trevor -- Plantinga -- Entourage.

For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world's piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. "Look," a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove "more complicated than they had first appeared" and "at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate." In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt's signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly "taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination."

Literary fiction.

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