She quit and planned to live off her savings. She would write full time.

But after quitting, it proved difficult to make progress. Her hard drive was already a graveyard of unfinished and abandoned projects. Weeks passed, and she found she wasn’t getting much writing done. Instead, she sat on the floor for long stretches of time, alone in her flat. One day, during this period of paralysis and growing despair, she talked to her father in the United States. Over the long-distance line, he began hectoring her for not being sufficiently hopeful about her life—which, DeWitt told me, did little to kindle hope in her.

Her father had a unique talent, she recalled, of reminding you that— however depressed you might think you were— deeper basements of hopelessness were available to you. Nearing a new bottom, DeWitt reflected on the fact that you can’t pick your parents. Certainly, if she had ever been given the chance, she would have chosen someone different. Sitting on the floor of the flat, back against the wall, brooding on her miserable relationship with her father and the creative impasse she had reached, something was dislodged within her.

What would it mean, she wondered, for a child to select his father? It was “a completely preposterous idea,” but one that captured her, blooming in her mind, filling her with enthusiasm. What sort of adult would be a plausible candidate for surrogate fatherhood? What education might allow the child to make an informed decision? And at what age would this lucky child, on the one hand, be capable of making a serious choice while, on the other, be young enough to have that choice be meaningful? After all, the point of choosing one’s father should be, at the very least, to be raised by that father, to discover who you were, who you might become, through the medium of good parenting.

Rigorously well balanced, stately paragraphs shred into spindly fragments. The mother is trying to explain something but is constantly being interrupted. The boy recombines Greek numerical prefixes to create new adjectives. The son’s incessant questions—Who was X? Who was Y? Why don’t you Z?— create a tempo of agitation and interruption not only for the mother but also for the reader. Greek-derived numerical prefixes bludgeon the listener. The mind of this new version of Ludo’s mother can barely sustain a thought, let alone explain everything. In the contrast between these two versions of the same passage, we see the difference between writing “as if for an intelligent six-year-old” and writing while doing the unpaid reproductive labor of taking care of an intelligent sixyear-old, the difference between writing without interruption and writing while having to do other work.

[...] The Last Samurai has largely been written about as if it were part of the postmodern tradition. It’s often taken as an example of one of the most prestigious postmodern genres, encyclopedic narrative, “an almost super-canonical form, yet one that is virtually unread.” Sam Anderson has called The Last Samurai a “meganovel.” The Last Samurai was the subject of a group read at Veronica Esposito’s literary blog Conversational Reading (in the manner of Infinite Summer, dedicated to David Foster Wallace, or #OccupyGaddis). Contemporary encyclopedic narrative is typically defined by its length, its eager incorporation of technological and scientific rhetoric, its formal difficulty, and its ambition to make an all-encompassing artistic statement about the character of contemporary life. And it is overwhelmingly assumed to be a masculine genre.

Critics who celebrate the encyclopedic novel have argued that DeWitt not only belongs to this tradition but has broadened its gender profile. Steven Moore begins his Washington Post review, for example, by explaining that “the learned novel is mostly a guy thing.” DeWitt has, he suggests, “crashed this boys club,” and “The Last Samurai will crown DeWitt this year’s It Girl of postmodernism.” Sven Birkerts highlights DeWitt as a writer who is “writing determinedly outside the domestic pigeonhole (old stereotypes live on)” and can “match their male colleagues in inventiveness and a willingness to take on the zeitgeist.” Stephen Burn has suggested that The Last Samurai is an emblem of the “broadening” of the encyclopedic tradition to include authors other than straight white men. The all-male panel of judges who shortlisted the book for the Orange Prize describe the book in similar terms. The book is, according to one summary of the deliberations for the prize, a “bravura grandstand of intellectualism, which eschews plot and character to revel in the sheer delight of languages and obscure learning.” The Last Samurai is “a witty, smart, cerebral book” that “appeals to the brains and a sense of the absurd rather than to the heart and reader/character empathy.” “Pack[ing] an emotional punch,” we learn, is “not DeWitt’s game.” DeWitt is also passive-aggressively praised for being, perhaps, too much like male novelists who are guilty of “show[ing] off in their writing, putting their logo on the text, never allowing the reader to forget them.”

These are not incorrect assessments—DeWitt does have encyclopedic ambitions—but there are problems with this line of interpretation. First, these critics generally ignore or minimize important encyclopedic works by women such as Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), Margaret Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling (1965), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), Gayl Jones’s Mosquito (1999), and Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel (2010). [...]

[...] And as reviewers have frequently pointed out, DeWitt is as interested in writing fiction as she is in discussing information theory and linguistics and classical scholarship. One critic suggests that The Last Samurai is “a rare work of knowledge porn that actually conveys knowledge.” Unlike other recent novels such as The Secret History or Special Topics in Calamity Physics, the intellectual content of The Last Samurai “actually” matters to its author— and, by extension, is supposed to matter to us readers. What if, DeWitt seems to ask, our intellectual lives weren’t so alienated? What if novels could produce and disseminate knowledge?

[...] DeWitt’s novel hopes for a world that might make it possible to write a better sort of literature and be ready to receive that literature. The Last Samurai is not an example of that hypothetical literature. DeWitt knows perfectly well—though she may not always admit it in interviews and essays—that such a vision of literature is, under current institutional arrangements, improbable. But the improbability of its own aspiration is part of what makes The Last Samurai compelling. As long as we live in a world of wasted potential, the book will continue to speak to those who might hope to build a better world, a more rational institutional life, and who hope art might play some role in the making of such a world.

Autotelic education requires, in her view, a radical transformation of our cultural institutions, social expectations, and economic lives.