Helen DeWitt, _Some Trick_

SECOND INSTALLMENT IN my campaign to read more collections of short fiction. Having admired the two DeWitt novels I have read (The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods), I figured this was  a good bet, and it did not disappoint.

I spotted a recurring theme. Anyone pursuing an art needs an array of skills having to do with supporting oneself as an artist--not just covering rent and groceries, as we all do, but also dealing with gallery owners, foundations, publishers, universities, and so on in labyrinthine profusion. One might be extremely skilled in one's art and yet quite bad at the necessary auxiliary skills; by the same token, one might have a rare gift for the auxiliary skills without having any remarkable talent for one's art. Which is the better position to be in, do you think? Either way, tragedy looms.

Gil, the Boy from Iowa who become's everyone's right-hand man in "On the Town" due to his deftness at the auxiliary skills, has by the time of "Climbers" become a famous writer himself; his efforts to lend a hand to an obscure European writer's writer with zero auxiliary skills are both hilarious and painful to read about. A poker-playing music journalist winds up with the copyright to a mega-hit. A painter whose paintings find no takers discovers the clothes she made as a student dressmaker are inexplicably in demand--solving her cash flow problems, perhaps, until it turns out her internationally famous gallerist is a scam artist.

The book's real hallmark, though, is intelligence. Not only do the characters tend to be intelligent, the sorts of people who are comfortably conversant with histograms, Chopin, Botticelli, Barthes, and trigonometric identities, but the stories require the readers to stay on their toes. Like John Keen's Conjunctions, Some Trick would rather risk under-explaining than over-explaining; the reader gets all the needed information, but will have to do a certain amount of the adding-things-up on his or her own. It's stimulating to read a writer who asks quite a bit of you, even though this tendency may keep DeWitt out of the New Yorker (vide supra on auxiliary skills).