"The Last Samurai" is a work of genius

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From the New York Times review:

"The progenitor of these projects is Sibylla, a woman of frightening intellectual intensity who trades America for Oxford in an attempt to avoid a family tradition of dreams deferred. Frustrated by the limited scope of her Oxford studies, she soon drops out, opting for a precarious existence at society's margins in a sad parallel to the American life she had tried to escape.

Nine months after a drunken tryst with a popular travel writer, Sibylla gives birth to Ludo, a child prodigy who at 4 is reading the ''Odyssey'' in Greek. Sibylla refuses Ludo knowledge of his father because she can't bear the idea of involving such a banal man in the life of her son.

As a father substitute, Sibylla offers Kurosawa's film ''The Seven Samurai,'' which she watches obsessively in her attempt to escape the drudgery and mediocrity of the real world. Rather than sating Ludo's paternal yearnings, the film inspires him to embark, at 11, upon a quest to choose his own father. ...

Ludo shares the novel's narrative center with a cast of seven potential fathers, one literal and six wishful, whom Ludo seeks out during his Kurosawa-inspired quest. The lives of these men are provided in asides that almost constitute a short-story collection within the body of the novel.

DeWitt's imaginative powers are showcased here as she details these engaging and eccentric men, luminaries in fields ranging from astronomy to professional bridge. DeWitt's facility with their stories is so convincing that you wonder, briefly, if these characters are based upon historical figures -- a true marker of effective fiction.

Ironically, these men often feel more real than Sibylla herself, who becomes more a collection of quirks than a multidimensional presence."

The Last Samurai is laugh-out-loud funny, highly ingenious and a page-turner; it's rationalist-libertarian, self-satirical and smart. I have her latest, Some Trick, on the stack downstairs.

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Here's the more erudite Paris Review on DeWitt's novel.