Your Name Here

DeWitt (Lightning Rods) teams up with journalist Gridneff for an audacious metafiction in which the pair attempt to cash in on a freewheeling novel they're writing together, also called Your Name Here. It begins with a clever second-person chapter addressed to the “surly and uncommunicative” reader, who considers buying a novel called Lotteryland by “notorious recluse misanthrope” Rachel Zozanian, figuring that “reclusiveness and misanthropy could be the hair of the dog.” Instead, he opts for Your Name Here, remembering how his lit bro friend recommended DeWitt’s 2000 novel The Last Samurai. A series of 2006 emails between DeWitt and Gridneff, an Australian tabloid reporter she met in London, reveal how Gridneff’s “anarchic, obscene” voice gave DeWitt the idea to collaborate on Your Name Here with him. In the novel within the novel, a Gridneff stand-in named Alyosha Pechorin chases celebrities like Britney Spears, becomes a war journalist in Iraq, and chronicles his sexual exploits, while Zozanian, whose chapters are written by DeWitt, hides out in Berlin, where she emails with Pechorin and schemes to profit off her rumored suicide. Alternating with this epistolary hall of mirrors are chapters from the Philip K. Dickian Lotteryland, a book within the book within the book. Each of these strands are irresistible, as are the many other dizzying layers, such as the authors’ endlessly quotable banter about their project and its place in a staid literary marketplace peopled by the “pullulating Da Vinci Coded masses.” Readers will be left breathless. (Oct.)

Correction: A previous version of this review misspelled coauthor Ilya Gridneff’s last name.