Part of a series of New Directions 'storybooks' meant to be read in a single sitting, The English Understand Wool is a little gift to DeWitt’s (often ardent) readers and an inviting primer for readers new to her. DeWitt is one of our most ingenious writers, a master of the witty fable, and she pulls off her trick here through marvelous specificity of voice and a plot that hums like German machinery.
The latest from Helen DeWitt, an eccentric genius of our own day and age, is a delicious novella entitled The English Understand Wool ... With an impeccably straight face, Ms. DeWitt renders Marguerite’s prim, refined voice, in the process landing superb satirical shots at the publishing industry and the hypocrisies of the current marketplace for trauma narratives ... But no novelty attaches to this work, another of Ms. DeWitt’s classically understated comic jewels.
The arrival of a new book by DeWitt, even one in short pants, is cause enough for celebration. They’re one-of-a-kind, as funny-haha as they are funny-peculiar. And, as she demonstrated with her 2018 short-story collection, Some Trick, she’s just as brilliant on smaller canvases ... is as much a terrific character study as it is a satire, with Marguerite’s quirks driving both plot and comedy ... Marguerite, like many of DeWitt’s characters, operates by her own peculiar logic, and much of the humor derives from seeing it teased out to the nth degree ... a perfect introduction to the anarchic pleasures of DeWitt’s fiction. Once again, using the obtuse ratiocination of her characters, DeWitt aims at nothing less than expanding readerly consciousness, gesturing toward a world of untapped possibility freed from convention. Why go to school if you’re not going to learn anything? If the law is stupid, flout it! Don’t let the bastards get you down! ... For that insight alone, keeping up with Helen DeWitt remains an essential, invigorating and wickedly pleasurable way to spend your time.
A midsummer’s night dream, a turbulent and amoral comedy, disrupting the sleep with its dodges and masks—altogether a delight. The English Understand Wool offers another spin snowball of a narrative, gathering weight as it slaloms the hills of Dewitt’s imagination. That trick gave us most of the brainy, bonkers collection Some Trick, in 2018, also delicious reading, by and large. Still, this new story delivers a deeper thrill, barbed yet sweet ... The upheaval comes not quite halfway into this 'storybook,' both a tingly surprise and another demonstration of Dewitt’s splendid pacing ... The last thing I’d want to do is drop some clanging spoiler into the seamless machinery of so short a narrative.
Brilliant ... DeWitt has a knack for delivering acutely eccentric ideas with such intense frequency and in a no-nonsense tone that readers become almost persuaded of their unarguable logic ... While DeWitt’s unapologetically cerebral narrative style might leave some readers cold, those looking for a change from today’s overload of self-obsessed confessional poetry will find her refreshing.
DeWitt serves up a tasty confection of a story ... Yet this long short story is also a lovingly hand-tipped poison arrow aimed for the heart of the elite culture in which it has found a home ... Thank god New Directions has brought so many of DeWitt’s many thousands of words to the light.
A sixty-one-page gripe wrapped in tissue and dressed up with a bow ... As far as I’m concerned, DeWitt can write whatever she wants ... I didn’t want the book to end; I assume DeWitt finished it because she needed the money.
It makes for a delightful story, an ultra-elegant skewering of the publishing industry at its big-house, sensationalistic-bestseller-seeking worst, taking on (and out) the editors, agents, and lawyers involved with one neat stab ... Marguerite's writing may lack 'feeling', or at least an expression of emotion, but the tone rings beautifully ... Appealingly indulgent, The English Understand Wool then is a lovely piece of work -- slight in the best possible way. It's funny, too, and very satisfying ... Most enjoyable, and certainly recommended.
The English Understand Wool is Helen DeWitt’s best and funniest book so far – quite a feat given the standards set by the rest of her work ... Its pages are rife with wicked pleasures. It incites and rewards re-reading ... The prime directive of DeWitt’s fiction has always been to unsettle our ideas about how the world can be.
DeWitt’s writing has a style: full of mathematical and polyglottal jargon, littered with footnotes, populated by characters with intransigent opinions. And DeWitt’s writing is about style, all those problems of aesthetics and taste ... The English Understand Wool is barely 50 pages long, comprised of short chapters and dominated by white space ... In the context of DeWitt’s work, 'minor' can never be applied in general ... DeWitt mostly ignores the minor things that obsess so much contemporary literary fiction, all the bits and motes of the natural world, grasses and sunlight and birdcalls ... For DeWitt and her characters, differences are key. In their devotion to aesthetic life, her characters make detailed distinctions and fine judgements of taste. Her work, in turn, attends to the differences between those characters, the circumstances of their lives—which is where all good work, aesthetic and political, major and minor, begins.
...what makes her fiction so singular and rich is that her obsession with characters who push against the constraints society has imposed on them extends to the conventional forms of writing she herself is constantly attempting to subvert. Unlike many deliberately experimental novelists, however, DeWitt does not treat dismantling narrative expectations as an end in itself; her intention is always to enhance, and expand, our ideas of what fiction can be, what is possible. Like a rugby player, DeWitt pitches the ball backward, but only in order to move it forward ... he novella The English Understand Wool, is quintessential DeWitt—many stories in one, each artful in its own right but combining to make a kind of extra story that takes the work as a whole beyond what the others could accomplish by themselves.
