Until a few weeks ago, when The New York Times’s list of the best books of this century reminded me of the oversight, I had never read “The Last Samurai,” by Helen DeWitt.
I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that for years I overlooked it because I thought it was the source material for the Tom Cruise movie of the same name, which held little appeal for me. Nor did I notice, in 2018, when Vulture declared it the book of the century, perhaps because at the time my life was dominated by a 6-week-old infant who didn’t think much of literary fiction.
But I’ve now finally read the book, which is just as good as everyone said. Although, like all really good literature, I had the feeling while reading it that no one else had ever really grasped its brilliance, which of course could only be properly understood when refracted through the lens of my own life.
As it turns out, the plot is not remotely about Tom Cruise fighting alongside 19th-century Samurai in Japan. Rather, it follows the story of a woman named Sibylla raising her brilliant young son Ludo in genteel poverty in 1990s London. Unable to afford heat for their home, the two spend their days riding the Circle Line of the London Underground.
While the story is nominally centered around Ludo’s efforts to find his father, it is really about the pain and pleasure of integrating a unique mind into a world that values different things. Sibylla and Ludo both have excruciatingly high standards, the genius needed to attain them, and a near-total inability to tolerate compromise. Because most people’s lives are a series of compromises made bearable by self-delusion, Sibylla and Ludo are isolated, cut off from the outside world and outside relationships.
The particular joy of the book, I think, is that the characters are so intensely and specifically themselves that it is impossible to imagine them working in a more conventional novel. But I believed in them completely — a testament to the strength of DeWitt’s writing.
The novel also made me laugh, which came as a pleasant surprise. Not because no one had told me it would be funny — they had — but because I was expecting it to be funny-compared-to-dour-literary-fiction funny, not funny-compared-to-other-funny-things funny. Happily, it was the latter.
The other book I’ve been reading, “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States” by the legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, unsurprisingly bears no direct resemblance to DeWitt’s novel. And yet in some ways it circles a similar question: when is a compromise better than nothing, and when do the costs of such a compromise become too much to bear?
The U.S. Constitution was designed to force and facilitate compromise between states, parties, and branches of government. But Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law School, argues that a series of political changes since the 1960s have made the Constitution increasingly unfit for purpose.
The opening sentence of the prologue sets the tone for the blistering critique that follows: “The U.S. Constitution, which created a government that succeeded so well for so long, now itself threatens American democracy.” Things go on in a similar fashion from there.
The book works as a kind of legal-scholarship companion to last fall’s “Tyranny of the Minority,” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, which employs a political scientist’s lens to analyze many of the same issues. Its conclusions are eerily similar: “For more than two centuries,” Levitsky and Ziblatt write, “the U.S. Constitution has succeeded in checking the power of ambitious and overreaching presidents. But flaws in our Constitution now imperil our democracy.”
Both books identify a similar set of problems: that the counter-majoritarian protections originally designed to foster compromise and unity, including the structure of the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College, now reinforce polarization and gridlock. But while the authors offer some suggestions for how things might improve, all acknowledge that changing the Constitution would require the assent of those who currently benefit from those flaws — an unlikely prospect.
“Many times along the way, I thought of abandoning this project because I don’t have answers,” Chemerinsky writes in the acknowledgments at the end of his book. “But in the end, I think it is important to face where we are as a country, to discuss the problems, and to consider possible solutions.”
Reader responses: Books that offer a new perspective on Nazi Germany
Drorah Setel, a reader in Rochester, NY, recommends “Bambi” a novel by the Austrian Jewish writer Felix Salten, first published in 1923 and later adapted into the Disney classic of the same name:
Like most people I think, I thought of Bambi as a children’s story. Instead, it is a powerful, heart-rending, and prescient allegory about Jews in a hostile European society. It is one of several books from the 1920s and 30s I’ve been reading as I look for the signs of growing autocracy in my own country.
Joseph Blondo, a reader in San Lorenzo, N.M., recommends “Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022” by Frank Trentmann:
I have been reading about World War II since I was ten years old (I am now 70), and my first step into Europe was Düsseldorf, West Germany in April 1982. Even so, Trentmann’s thorough examination of the German (and World War II) experience is a revelation. I swear, with each page turned, I learn something new. It is a remarkable history. Who shouldn’t be reading it is the question.
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