The Last Samurai is about so much more than education

Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai* is utterly unlike any other book I've ever read.

*Which came out three years before the completely unrelated Tom Cruise vehicle, I'll have you know!

Initially published in 2000 to some acclaim, the novel has picked up a reputation since its 2016 reprinting as being singularly brilliant, and for very good reason. It marries the maximalism of roughly contemporaneous (and far better-selling) works like White Teeth and Infinite Jest to a narrow, intense focus on character, voice, and interiority as it tells the story of a mother with a deeply unorthodox attitude toward education and a son who longs for a deeper understanding of himself. Its sprawl isn't across continents or timelines but, rather, over the scattered activity of a pair of brilliant and anxious minds. It interrupts its own narrative voice constantly, breaking in the middle of sentences or paragraphs to switch to a new thought before returning to the prior one as if it had never left. In the process, it creates a mode of storytelling that lives entirely outside the dichotomy of unadorned versus "voicey" prose that I've seen modern fiction writers insist upon. Its narrative structure, too, is daring, changing protagonists mid-novel and only getting to the plot you'll see blurbed on the back of the book after more than half its page count.

The Last Samurai, in brief, is a book that asks quite a bit of its readers, and in return it gives you a sense of complete intellectual and emotional immersion. It makes complete sense to me that, as influential as it's been on so many writers, few have tried to copy DeWitt's style, as I cannot imagine how someone would pull off writing a work like this without going absolutely bananas. I try not to use this word often, but I'm in complete agreement with A.O. Scott that The Last Samurai is a work of legitimate literary genius.

And it's also a book by an author who seems to have a shaky grasp on what exactly makes her own work so special.

If you look carefully at the back of the second edition of The Last Samurai, you'll find a pull quote attributed to "Daniel (age 14)." In this quote, Daniel explains that "the book has been a great source of motivation for me," as he wants to "outdo" Ludo, the novel's terrifyingly precocious child protagonist. It's a strange packaging choice that makes more sense if you take a look at the novel's afterword, in which DeWitt (writing in 2016) explains that readers may find Ludo's intellect and linguistic capacity shocking only because so little is expected of children in contemporary Britain. "A world in which large numbers of small children steal their siblings' Imagier Franco-Japonais is by no means unflawed, but it looks better than what we have," she writes. "We should fight for it when and where we can."

DeWitt, in brief, believes that The Last Samurai, if it must be reduced to a single argument, is meant to challenge prevailing paradigms about what sorts of intellectual feats children are capable of. She's not alone in this read, to be clear: Christian Lorentzen of Vulture makes a convincing case for it, including the argument that the book is full of entry points to studying the sorts of things that fascinate Ludo. And DeWitt's position — that we underestimate children — is made over and over in the text by Sibylla, Ludo's mother-slash-tutor and the narrator of the novel's first half.

And yet I struggle to believe that the most interesting thing about The Last Samurai really is its point of view on education. DeWitt's read seems to take for granted that Sibylla is correct about the nature of education and the world at large, something the narrative consistently complicates. Seeing a work as character-centered as The Last Samurai as, essentially, a five-hundred-page argument about pedagogy gives short shrift to the richness of its characterization and the potency of its themes. What it has to say about early childhood education seems less important to the novel itself than, well, what it has to say about people who have lots of very strong opinions about early childhood education.

Ludo is, from the time he's born, a child living in exceptional circumstances. His mother, Sibylla, is the daughter of two brilliant but unfulfilled Americans who's hanging onto her UK work authorization by transcribing old magazine articles in an unheated apartment. Ludo doesn't know who his father is, and that's intentional on Sibylla's part. She's humiliated by the intellectual vapidity of the travel writer she drunkenly hooked up with and wants him to have no part in her son's life. Instead, she's decided that Ludo will learn about the masculine parts of life from works of art that interest her: The Iliad, Icelandic sagas, and especially Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. When Ludo asks Sibylla how to read ancient Greek, she teaches him, and he's a very quick study. They spend the years he's meant to be in preschool riding the Tube back and forth while he reads ancient tomes in his stroller.

When Ludo finally does go to school, it's an absolute disaster. DeWitt is careful to write Ludo as a very smart child, not a tiny adult: In the portions of the book around his middle single-digit years, he's fond of screaming out Greek numerals for his own amusement in the middle of a crowded train. In the classroom, his overachievement and his (entirely age-appropriate!) lack of emotional maturity make him a serious problem for his teachers, who beg Sibylla for help keeping him on-task and motivated. Sibylla, offended by the idea that Ludo would be a nuisance, ends up withdrawing him from school entirely. And while it's easy to see her point of view — one of Ludo's misdemeanors was, apparently, helping other kids find math fun — it's still true that social emotional development of the kind he could only get around other children would probably do Ludo some good.

But homeschool it is and, with only his mother as a teacher, Ludo internalizes and replicates both her exceptional command of languages and the strange, distant way she regards other humans. He teaches himself more than a dozen languages and muddles through aerodynamics textbooks. And, sometimes, he sits down and watches Seven Samurai with an obviously depressed Sibylla.

He's smart enough to know that his mother, a legitimately brilliant person, probably didn't intend to wind up in a dead-end transcription job for over a decade, and he's immensely frustrated by her refusal to just tell him who his dad was. Yet, at the same time, he idolizes her, and he lives his young life in accordance with principles that she sets forth. Everything that makes him himself is, at least in part, an imitation of something he's learned from Sibylla.

All of which makes the novel's second part — Ludo's search for his father — so enthralling. When he's on the cusp of his teen years, he tracks down a man he thinks might be his father on a hunch and is horrified to learn that the person he's found is, in fact, his biological dad. This man speaks in clichés. He refuses to engage in intellectual arguments. He is, just as Sibylla warned, the antithesis of everything she raised Ludo to be. It's repulsive to Ludo to think that he might be related to someone like this, to consider that his entire personality and conception of himself is contingent on having been raised by Sibylla rather than his father.

And so, he sets off on a quest to find a substitute father, a person who can be the mentor his real dad never could. He goes in search of people his mom mentions in passing, explorers, physicists, writers, and artists who've lived lives she clearly thinks are more worthy of acclaim than the sad, colorless one his actual dad has lived. This section, while taking up far less of the novel's page count than most plot summaries would suggest, is the crux of The Last Samurai: By searching for someone who can help him understand himself outside the context of his mother, Ludo begins to grow up. He meets people whose life experiences are rich and intellectual despite involving little engagement with the classics, and he meets cruel, vicious men whose staggering intellects have provided them little moral character. In one grueling scene, he visits a man who's just decided to die by suicide, and while he's committed to his (often suicidally depressed) mother's philosophy of allowing people to die if they want to, he's harrowed by the experience. He never finds a father, precisely, but he ends the novel having found an unexpected rapport with a former child prodigy, someone with whom he feels a kinship that has to do with lived experience.

The Last Samurai is a dual character study, one that centers both a parent trying to nurture a child's talent and that child trying to live a life beyond the limits of that nurturing. Sibylla's theories of child-rearing and education are vital to the text, sure, but they largely function as characterization. She's trying to give Ludo everything she felt she was denied when she was his age. And those specific theories of education are a double-edged sword, giving Ludo access to intellectual worlds beyond those of his peers but simultaneously cutting him off from the emotional and social growth he could get from engaging with those same peers. All the men Ludo wants as his father are bound together by intellectual curiosity, but few of them take a particular interest in ancient languages. It's from learning about their life experiences that he begins to differentiate, to form his own idea of who he can be.

The way Ludo was educated is important, yes, but to overemphasize that education's role in the text is fundamentally to distract from the rich coming-of-age story at the novel's center. The Last Samurai is simply more interesting when it considers not just what makes a child precocious but how a precocious child comes to understand the messy world they've been born into.

So, yes, suffice it to say that I don't agree with DeWitt's interpretation of her best-known novel. And yet, at the same time, I find it somewhat beautiful that DeWitt has such a reductive read of her own book. I don’t doubt the extreme amounts of effort and talent that went into producing something like this. But I also have reason to suspect that it gets at its themes in the same way that it came to be written with such a strange story-shape and in so distinctive a voice: through the subconscious mystery of the creative brain.

In an age of AI slop winning literary awards, it's refreshing to be reminded of the decidedly organic capacity to find transcendence beyond that which we can articulate or categorize. There's nothing more human than creating a work so massive that even you can't quite wrap your arms around it; in fact, that may be my definition of genius.

A Good Song

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