The Last Samurai

Her style is brilliantly heartless, and cork-dry; original herself, she is a witty examiner of human and cultural eccentricity. She is, above all, playful... What grounds all DeWitt's brilliance and game-playing is the way that she dramatizes a certain kind of hyperintelligent rationalism and probes its irregular distribution of blindness and insight...a wonderfully funny book, but comedy dances near the abyss; the apprehension of humor's frailty links DeWitt to the tragicomic tradition of Cervantes, Sterne, and Nabokov James Wood New Yorker