The stories in this collection remind you repeatedly that Helen DeWitt is fiercely intelligent. Many of her protagonists are also fiercely intelligent. And it would be fascinating to witness her sitting down with them at a dinner party, but rather too frightening for one to attend. Many of these stories are from her early days in Oxford and efficiently take that as their setting. Others are set about the world and unsurprisingly involve characters with a profusion of languages. The subjects of the stories range wildly but all involve some sort of intellectual problem that needs resolution or at least confrontation. You will either find such esoteric manias thrilling or distressing.

The writing is always crisp and sometimes pointed. It can border on the introspective but interiority of this form is typically also expressive in some fashion. Probably best not to worry too much about it; just go along with the story and it will work itself out.

Easy to recommend but probably not for everyone. ( )

Had to really struggle to finish this. I liked a couple of the stories, but mostly I just didn’t understand them very well. I think I’d need to be smarter and better educated to really comprehend much of it. There’s definitely a sense of humor there, and it was frustrating to feel too stupid to really get it. Oh well... ( )

Check out my review in Rain Taxi Review of Books: Volume 23, Number 4, Winter 2018 (#92).

Brilliant collection of stories. I might be the perfect audience for these stories. Wide ranging stories of ideas in a traditional sense, one sees DeWitt's brilliance (not a word used lightly) radiate through pretty much every story in the collection. Try the first one or two, and see if it's for you or not. Will likely attempt her Last Samurai relatively soon. ( )

[Thoughts from a little more than halfway through: ]

It's hard to explain what I love about Helen DeWitt's writing. It's partly her cast of mind: the best way I can put it is that she has the brain of a nerd and the soul of an artist. And while she's always taking the piss out of someone or something, she doesn't come across as smug, and there's an intense (even desperate) seriousness underlying even her relatively flippant passages. Her attitude toward the world (and many of the people in it) ranges from fury to contempt to despair, but not only does she see the funny side, she communicates a powerful sense of the richness of the life of the mind.

I don't know how much of this is actually apparent in these stories; I'm definitely reading them against the backdrop of The Last Samurai.

Some Trick is not a patch on The Last Samurai, and so far there's no single story in it that I'd enthusiastically recommend. The endings are mostly underwhelming (or, in the case of Improvisation Is the Heart of Music, baffling) -- it's not that I need a payoff or a twist, but I think there's an art to writing a quiet ending without leaving the reader feeling like they're missing something. Still, the stories are enjoyable and clever and sometimes funny, and there's enough of DeWitt's distinctive sensibility in this book that I'm very glad to be reading it.

[update on finishing: ]

A mixed bag in both senses -- with the exception of a few groups of two or three that overlap quite heavily, the subject matter and tone vary considerably; but so does the quality, or at least I feel that way after reading the final story, Entourage, which did not work for me at all. There's still no single story I wholeheartedly recommend, but I'm very glad I read this and I hope DeWitt keeps writing and publishing.

To anyone who wants to begin by sampling a story or two, I'd probably suggest Brutto (a satire on the art world with something a little darker running just beneath the surface), Famous Last Words (a quiet meditation on intellectual/physical relationships), and perhaps On the Town (a fun riff on the absurdity of the entrepreneurial, jack-of-all-trades, self-made modern American success story). ( )