book review the english understand wool

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‘The English Understand Wool’ is a little gift to Helen DeWitt fans

In a key early scene, the narrator of Helen DeWitt’s new novella sits at a London restaurant with her “Maman,” who is acting “grave” — perhaps because she has just received a perturbing phone call, or perhaps because “it was her habit to be serious when ordering wine.” Maman then imparts some lessons whose significance she wishes our narrator, Marguerite, to recognize. Among them: “The French understand wine, cheese, bread”; “the Germans understand precision, machines”; and “the Arabs understand honor.” Maman explains that she does not mean that these qualities are “instantiated in every individual” of a culture, but rather that “it is as if certain qualities flourish in certain social conjunctions.”

The next day Maman will vanish, leaving 17-year-old Marguerite to discover that this woman is not her mother but rather her kidnapper and the thief who stole a fortune that the infant Marguerite ought to have inherited when her parents died.

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But why, when stealing $100 million from a baby, would one also steal the baby? Why would one raise the child in high style in Marrakesh, Morocco — with distinguished music instructors, Savile Row tailoring and lessons at the Royal Tennis Academy — and why scrupulously inculcate in her aristocratic standards of excellence and generosity?

Because to do otherwise, we understand, would be “mauvais ton.” Roughly that means “bad taste,” though Marguerite insists that no English translation will do, just as no other wool measures up to the wool in the tweeds of the Outer Hebrides. The avoidance of mauvais ton is the principle by which Maman and Marguerite live. Its applications are not just aesthetic but also moral. And it will be tested when the abandoned Marguerite — in possession of a sensational story and in need of money — signs a book deal. The novella’s core plot is Marguerite’s attempt to stay true to herself while up against the very mauvais ton cabal of New York agents, lawyers and editors with whom she now has contractual relationships.

Part of a series of New Directions “storybooks” meant to be read in a single sitting, “ The English Understand Wool ” is a little gift to DeWitt’s (often ardent) readers and an inviting primer for readers new to her. DeWitt is one of our most ingenious writers, a master of the witty fable, and she pulls off her trick here through marvelous specificity of voice and a plot that hums like German machinery.

As in DeWitt’s first novel, “ The Last Samurai ,” we have a multilingual child raised under an unusual and demanding code — and a story that asks whether this code, if widely adopted, might not leave us all better off. Marguerite’s distinctive sensibility causes dire creative differences with her publisher. One problem is that Marguerite will not testify to the betrayal that she is expected to feel. This apparently degrades her memoir’s sales prospects. “Perhaps there were people who would like to hear about feelings,” Marguerite explains, “but I did not think they were people I would want to know.” But she has been traumatized, her editor insists; her “Maman” stole her money! To which Marguerite responds that she has no grievance, for “at 18 months I could not have used this one hundred million dollars to arrange to be brought up by the equal of Maman.”

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Such conflicts between the inescapable particularity of individuals and the inevitably commoditizing forces of commerce are another DeWitt specialty. They drive both “ Lightning Rods ,” her relentless corporate satire, and many stories in her collection “ Some Trick .” Those familiar with DeWitt’s frustrations in bringing books to market may mistake the publishing industry for this novella’s main target. But DeWitt’s real subject has never been New York publishing, which Marguerite considers tediously “provincial.” It is more broadly the ways that market incentives — and people too beholden to them — can undermine decency, truth, art and craftsmanship.

In contrast to the meretricious hacks whom she meets in New York, Marguerite sees Maman as a model employer and patron, an ethical snob who uses her (stolen) fortune to underwrite nobility on both sides of every exchange. In other words, Maman demands perfection by lavishly overpaying for it. She insists that her servants in Morocco “speak both English and French flawlessly.” Yet she also goes abroad for six weeks every year around Ramadan, for it would be mauvais ton to ask her salaried staff to work during that holiday or immediately after. She purchases a showroom in Paris for an inspired Thai seamstress. She offers accomplished musicians a private residence, asking in return only that they instruct Marguerite for one hour a week, provided that Marguerite can demonstrate ability and that they “would not find instruction intolerable.”

Of course, such conditions of employment sound as fanciful to most people with jobs as such spending does to most people without $100 million. But to young Marguerite, Maman’s way seems the minimum that good taste requires when disbursing a vast surplus. She does not see those crass, commoditizing forces as quite so inevitable, and she wonders why proverbial “New Yorkers,” with surpluses of their own, would perpetuate them.

How will Marguerite fare among those of us who conspire to accept mediocrity? Has the fugitive Maman really abandoned her? I won’t spoil the final twists of this playfully implausible parable, but I’ll hint at one of its lessons. If perhaps “certain qualities flourish in certain social conjunctions,” then we see that to live outside the law you must be honest — and that to live in New York you must apparently be something else.

No offense taken.

Julius Taranto’s debut novel, “The Moral Offset,” will be published in September 2023.

The English Understand Wool

By Helen DeWitt

New Directions. 64 pp. $17.95

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Review: The author of a literary classic, Helen DeWitt tries a novella on for size

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On the Shelf

'The English Understand Wool'

By Helen DeWitt New Directions: 64 pages, $18 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

New Directions is publishing Helen DeWitt’s new novella, “The English Understand Wool,” as part of a series called “Storybook ND,” promising “the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon.” Other authors featured in this series of highbrow pocket books include Clarice Lispector , César Aira and László Krasznahorkai, but even on these 60-odd pages alone, the experiment would be a success.

The arrival of a new book by DeWitt , even one in short pants, is cause enough for celebration. They’re one-of-a-kind, as funny-haha as they are funny-peculiar. And, as she demonstrated with her 2018 short-story collection, “ Some Trick ,” she’s just as brilliant on smaller canvases.

It seems unkind to spoil the sleight-of-hand pleasures of “ The English Understand Wool ,” but in brief: Marguerite, a 17-year-old raised in Marrakech and tutored in the ways of high culture and haute couture by a wealthy French mother and distant English father, finds herself abandoned one day at an expensive London hotel. Into her suite, instead of Maman, comes a detective bearing surprising news. Overnight, she becomes a person of international interest, and when she’s offered $2.2 million for the rights to a book about her life, she must figure out how to survive in a treacherous world of editors, agents and lawyers.

“It was quite clear that any ‘biopic’ would inevitably be in mauvais ton,” Marguerite observes, dismissing the idea of her life as a movie with one of her pet phrases (from the French: bad taste; vulgar; ill-bred). “But a book, a text, this is something one can control.”

Or so she thinks.

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DeWitt, who has seen the sharp end of publishing, knows otherwise. She’s had much to say about the industry — little of it nice — since her first novel, “ The Last Samurai ” (2000), was painfully delivered to the world. Though feted at the Frankfurt Book Fair , its publication was hampered by typesetting challenges, accounting errors and legal frustrations. Despairing, DeWitt twice attempted suicide. And while the finished book was well reviewed and has attracted an evangelical fan base, it was long out of print and only reissued in 2016 after a career-suppressing interval. Only one more novel has emerged — the sexual-harassment comedy “Lightning Rods” (2011). “The literary world does quite like the notion of genius,” DeWitt once wrote , “but it has no place for a Picasso.”

With this in mind, it’s tempting to read “Wool” as straight-up satire, focusing as it does on an ingenious but eccentric writer pitched against a philistine publisher. Marguerite’s editor, Bethany, bemused by her focus on Maman’s notions about textiles and the family’s Ramadan travel plans, hopes to coax from her a more sensational account of her childhood, inserting editorial suggestions such as: “ If you don’t talk about your feelings there is nothing to engage the reader and keep them turning the pages. ” Marguerite, however, sticks to her guns.

In fact, “Wool” is as much a terrific character study as it is a satire, with Marguerite’s quirks driving both plot and comedy. What she sees that Bethany doesn’t is that there are many roads to the truth. Her version of events, however idiosyncratic, is the only way she can explain herself; to tell the story any other way would be “in mauvais ton.” The English may understand wool, as Maman says, but that doesn’t mean they know what to do with velvet or satin. So it is with the material of our heroine’s life: There’s a right way to fashion it, even if at first it seems abstruse.

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Marguerite, like many of DeWitt’s characters, operates by her own peculiar logic, and much of the humor derives from seeing it teased out to the nth degree. Here she is dismissing Bethany’s objections to the bottle of Puligny-Montrachet she — a teenager — has managed to order over lunch in a Manhattan restaurant:

“If you tell me this is illegal, well, we are in the realm of speculation. Maybe they respect someone who respects good wine. Maybe they’re tired of people who come and order the cheapest thing on the list, or order whatever they happen to sell by the glass.” Five more withering contingencies follow before she concludes, with cool condescension, “Surely this is not what you wanted to discuss.”

In this respect, Marguerite recalls the great mother-son tag team of “The Last Samurai,” relentlessly subjecting everyday situations to their withering (if absurd) logical scrutiny. Six-year-old Ludo, trying to convince his mother he doesn’t need to go to school: “Let’s take two people about to undergo 10 years of horrible excruciating boredom at school, A dies at the age of 6 from falling out a window and B dies at the age of 6 + n where n is a number less than 10, I think we would all agree that B’s life was not improved by the additional n years.” The self-assured mind trapped in a world it perceives as irrational and moronic is perhaps DeWitt’s great subject.

“The English Understand Wool” is a perfect introduction to the anarchic pleasures of DeWitt’s fiction. Once again, using the obtuse ratiocination of her characters, DeWitt aims at nothing less than expanding readerly consciousness, gesturing toward a world of untapped possibility freed from convention. Why go to school if you’re not going to learn anything? If the law is stupid, flout it! Don’t let the bastards get you down!

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DeWitt’s inspired skepticism about the ways of the world stems, one suspects, from her love of languages, as reflected in Marguerite’s insistence on writing in French where only French will do. “If you were immersed in other languages,” DeWitt has written , “the arbitrariness of your own linguistic world would become visible — the authority of its conventions would no longer be uncontested.” As with language, so with thought: Step outside of orthodoxy, free the mind. For that insight alone, keeping up with Helen DeWitt remains an essential, invigorating and wickedly pleasurable way to spend your time.

Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.

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Helen dewitt's novella 'the english understand wool' hits big.

Andrew Limbong

The 2022 novella The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt is both a psychological thriller AND a satirical critique of the publishing industry. It's also sold out everywhere.

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The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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A- : a lovely, satisfying piece of work

See our review for fuller assessment.

   From the Reviews : "It’s not giving too much away to say that the final twist in this artful tale involves the use of language not to convey meaning, but to establish and maintain a channel of communication. The English Understand Wool is DeWitt’s most Spartan utterance to date." - David Trotter, London Review of Books "In fact, Wool is as much a terrific character study as it is a satire, with Marguerite’s quirks driving both plot and comedy. (...) DeWitt aims at nothing less than expanding readerly consciousness, gesturing toward a world of untapped possibility freed from convention." - Charles Arrowsmith, The Los Angeles Times "(A)n explosive rebuke to sensationalistic American publishing in this smart and multilayered story. (...) A showdown with Marguerite and Bethany in a French restaurant is worth the price of admission alone. DeWitt is at the top of her game." - Publishers Weekly "Helen DeWitt’s best and funniest book so far -- quite a feat given the standards set by the rest of her work. It is a heist story, an ethical treatise, a send-up of media culture, a defence of education and an indelibly memorable character portrait. Its pages are rife with wicked pleasures. It incites and rewards re-reading. (...) For those who have never read her before, The English Understand Wool is a terrific crash course in her themes of more than two decades: motherhood, genius, education and money." - Heather Cass White, Times Literary Supplement "(A) delicious novella (.....) With an impeccably straight face, Ms. DeWitt renders Marguerite’s prim, refined voice, in the process landing superb satirical shots at the publishing industry and the hypocrisies of the current marketplace for trauma narratives. (...) (A)nother of Ms. DeWitt’s classically understated comic jewels." - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal " The English Understand Wool is a little gift to DeWitt’s (often ardent) readers and an inviting primer for readers new to her. DeWitt is one of our most ingenious writers, a master of the witty fable, and she pulls off her trick here through marvelous specificity of voice and a plot that hums like German machinery." - Julius Taranto, The Washington Post Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

If you don't talk about your feelings there is nothing to engage the reader and keep them turning the pages.

Talking to someone might be an easier way to let it out, and then you can leave it to someone else to knock the text into shape, you can just get on with your life.

     I was conscious, above all, of extreme anxiety not to be guilty of mauvais ton.

- M.A.Orthofer , 6 September 2022

About the Author :

       American author Helen DeWitt was born in 1957.

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Book Review: The English Understand Wool – Helen DeWitt

Posted October 7, 2022 in Book Review

T he English Understand Wool

Helen DeWitt

New Directions

“DeWitt twins, indeed, something of the artisan with something of the saboteur, plotting against her critics just beyond the reader’s gaze.”

Helen DeWitt is often lauded for her erudition. Her debut novel The Last Samurai (2000) featured side-by-side translations of Greek, a page of Japanese phonological units, very large and very small font. Frequently referred to as a ‘genius’, DeWitt is really a master of her craft. She has this in common with the weavers, tailors, and musicians worthy of the patronage of Marguerite, the protagonist of her new novella, The English Understand Wool .

Marguerite is a 17-year-old girl raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father. Her mother (Maman) raises her to avoid, above all else and at all costs, mauvais ton (‘bad taste’). Maman buys wool in the Outer Hebrides but will only have it tailored in London. It is important that Marguerite can ride a horse, play tennis and bridge; crucial that she understand good wine. And having taste is not just a matter of distinguished hobbies – it means allowing the riad’s staff six paid weeks off for Ramadan and providing housing and a sound studio for an Alaskan jazz musician. Good taste is purchasing an atelier in a ‘useful arrondissement’ of Paris for a seamstress with curious gifts in ‘cotton, silk, satin, velvet, brocade’.

The image of a patron of the arts that DeWitt presents here suggests a kind of benign, extravagant feudalism. She has explored the more sinister side of such sponsorship in her 2018 short story ‘Brutto’, but here it is contrasted favourably with the treachery of the market. Marguerite is exposed to the worst of art commerce when her parents are hit by scandal. She is left to fend for herself in New York, where the readiest way out of the ominous shadow of mauvais ton is penning a book about her life. The rights sell for over two million dollars, but her editor – bad shoes, bad taste in restaurants – doesn’t care about the quality of linen in Ireland. She wants Marguerite to write about her ‘feelings’. It quickly becomes clear that the teenager’s agent and publisher have few scruples about how they get their bestseller.

DeWitt is no stranger to the predations of the publishing world. The Last Samurai was delayed for years by agents and editors who doubted its saleability. Her third novel, Your Name Here (co-authored with Ilya Gridneff) was dropped by its would-be publisher because of ‘technical challenges’. In a 2018 essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books , DeWitt wrote about the curator: one who supports artists because of their originality, not despite it. She wrote of a ‘hundred-odd unrealized projects immured on my hard drive, projects of which agents had said No Publisher Will Allow.’

DeWitt twins, indeed, something of the artisan with something of the saboteur, plotting against her critics just beyond the reader’s gaze. In passages worthy of the paciest thriller, Marguerite is able to manoeuvre the publisher into becoming her patron. When all is revealed, we may come to examine where our own tastes lie.

Words: Eve Hawksworth

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The English Understand Wool

4 November 2022

Helen DeWitt (Author)

Description

Maman was exigeante—there is no English word—and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.

"A staggeringly intelligent examination into the nature of truth, love, respect, beauty and trust...This is that rare thing, or merle blanc , as maman might say: a perfect book. I've read it four times, which you can do between breakfast and lunch." — Nicola Shulman, The Times Literary Supplement

"Weighing in at just 64 pages, Helen DeWitt’s  The English Understand Wool  is a delight." — Mia Levitin, The Irish Times

"This is a short, sharp sliver of a story—only 64 pages—but every single word is pitch perfect… Think of it as the literary equivalent of a shot of ice-cold vodka—Belvedere or Grey Goose only, of course." — Lucy Scholes, Prospect

"For a wonderfully sideways take on the complex intersections between class, wealth and power—intersections that invariably favour those who have most of them already—I recommend reading The English Understand Wool, by the American writer Helen DeWitt." — Alex Clark, The Observer

" The English Understand Wool  is Helen DeWitt’s best and funniest book so far – quite a feat given the standards set by the rest of her work… Its pages are rife with wicked pleasures. It incites and rewards re-reading." — Heather Cass White, The Times Literary Supplement

"Readers of Helen DeWitt’s limited previous output—two novels and a collection of stories in twenty-two years—will fall greedily on anything new. Her novella The English Understand Wool  exceeds expectations." — John Self, The Critic

Also By: Helen DeWitt

Helen DeWitt

E Book, 2019

Paperback, 2019

Some Trick: Thirteen Stories

Hardback, 2018

At last a new book: a baker’s dozen of stories all with Helen DeWitt’s razor-sharp genius

Finalist for theSaroyan Prize for Fiction

NPR Best Book of the Year

New York Public Library's Best Books...

The Last Samurai

Paperback, 2016

E Book, 2016

9780811230070

160 x 239 mm • 64 pages

9780811230087

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Literary Review

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Connor Harrison

Across 110th street, a slip in time, cut & run, the english understand wool, by helen dewitt, w w norton 64pp £12.99.

The English Understand Wool is narrated by seventeen-year-old Marguerite, trained by her mother in the ways of taste and high society. It isn’t long, however, before we discover that Maman and Daddy are not her real parents at all: they stole baby Marguerite and her $100 million inheritance from her appointed guardians. Now, on the cusp of being apprehended, the fugitives vanish, taking the fortune but not the child.

What follows this sudden abandonment is the $2.2 million sale of Marguerite’s ‘story’. The publisher and her editor insist on it being an account of trauma and betrayal, but Marguerite does not deal in public histrionics, which could only ever be ‘mauvais ton’. So instead she begins to write

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The English Understand Wool

Helen dewitt.

Storybook ND series

Readers of Helen DeWitt’s will fall greedily on anything new. Her novella The English Understand Wool exceeds expectations.

A modern amorality play about a 17-year-old girl, the wilder shores of connoisseurship, and the power of false friends

Fiction by Helen DeWitt

Maman was exigeante—there is no English word—and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.

Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton (“bad taste” loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?

Clothbound (published Sep, 27 2022)

American writer

A midsummer’s night dream, a turbulent and amoral comedy, disrupting the sleep with its dodges and masks—altogether a delight.

DeWitt is the sort of writer to whom engineering – the right mark in the right place, getting the message through – matters as much as exposition.

As far as I’m concerned, DeWitt can write whatever she wants.

Weighing in at just 64 pages, Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool is a delight.

That a ghost writer should commute her story – that of a ‘missing child’ raised outside the culture she was born into by imposters – to the kind of neutered copy the masses expect is quite out of the question. I am who I tell you I am, DeWitt seems to be saying, and I will speak for myself in the language of my choosing.

DeWitt’s mastery of adverbs is deserving of worship.

The English Understand Wool is Helen DeWitt’s best and funniest book so far - quite a feat given the standards set by the rest of her work. It is a heist story, an ethica; treatise, a send-up of media culture, a defence of education and an indelibly memorable character portrait. Its pages are rife with wicked pleasures. It incites and rewards re-reading.

Prose as sharp as Maman’s tailored clothes.

Step outside of orthodoxy, free the mind. For that insight alone, keeping up with Helen DeWitt remains an essential, invigorating and wickedly pleasurable way to spend your time.

When I finished The English Understand Wool in one greedy hour, I felt the immediate return of a distinctly childlike sensation: again! again! again!

DeWitt offers a paean to the lost art of connoisseurship, and also a critique of the way that commercial exploitation flattens anything it does not understand.

DeWitt is one of our most ingenious writers, a master of the witty fable, and she pulls off her trick here through marvelous specificity of voice and a plot that hums like German machinery.

DeWitt has plenty of stories to tell about mercenary literary agents, feckless editors and the systematically thwarted ambitions of artists. Her brilliant new novella, The English Understand Wool , is such a saga. Told, like her previous novels, from the point of view of an obsessive personality, this clever little book revolves around the education of seventeen-year-old Marguerite by her French mother on the rules of bon ton . DeWitt has a knack for delivering acutely eccentric ideas with such intense frequency and in a no-nonsense tone that readers become almost persuaded of their unarguable logic.

Brilliant and inimitable Helen DeWitt: patron saint of anyone in the world who has to deal with the crap of those in power who do a terrible job with their power, and who make those who are under their power utterly miserable.

A staggeringly intelligent examination into the nature of truth, love, respect, beauty and trust… This is that rare thing, or  merle blanc , as  maman  might say: a perfect book. I’ve read it four times, which you can do between breakfast and lunch.

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt is, strictly speaking, a book of last year, but it was only this year that it came into my ken and became an obsession. The pleasure begins even before you start reading, because it is, as an object, handsomer and wittier than any other volume on my shelves. A tall, slim, laminated hardback (69 pages divided into 32 sections) with a silver spine, Wayne Thiebaud’s Boston Cremes oozing over the front and a good splash of pink around the title, it looks like one of those school exercise books that you decorate at home with tinfoil and collage. But never judge a book by its cover: this is a brute and savage tale about the art of heartlessness, the folly of editors, verbal precision and mauvais ton . The ending is pure genius: De Witt’s daemon has a will of iron.

A bright jewel of a book, to light up an afternoon.

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Book Review :: The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt

• March 12, 2024
• Book Reviews

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

While The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt book is a couple of years old now, Ann Patchett recently revived interest in it during one of her weekly videos for Parnassus Books. New Directions publishes these storybooks, as they call them, that look like Little Golden Books from childhood and are short enough for readers to finish them in one sitting. This format reinforces the seemingly simplistic story DeWitt has crafted.

The main character—whom some call Marguerite—has been raised to appreciate luxury and valuable belongings. The title refers to the idea that only certain craftspeople or artisans can use raw materials well to create beautiful clothing and belongings. However, readers find out that Marguerite’s story is more complicated than first appears, and that she’s writing a memoir about that complicated past, one her publisher wants her to write differently.

Marguerite seems to understand little about the broader world, only aware of the sheltered life of luxury her mother exposed her to. There is little more to the plot than that, but there is much more to the book than that. Saying more would spoil the final third of this brief novel, but readers should know by now they can’t judge a book by its cover.

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt. One of the Storybooks 2023 Bundle available from New Directions .

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again , and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels . Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

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Briefly Noted

Sacred Nature , by Karen Armstrong (Knopf) . An urgent plea opens this nuanced exploration, by a veteran writer on religion, of our relationship to nature: if ecological disaster is to be avoided, Armstrong writes, “we need to recover the veneration of nature that human beings carefully cultivated for millennia.” What follows is a tour of how various spiritual traditions conceive of nature, with a focus on a common thread: an understanding of the natural world as a unified whole shot through by “an immanent sacred force.” This concept, prominent in Eastern thought, was also a feature of Western monotheist traditions before we began treating nature as “a mere resource.” “While it is essential to cut carbon emissions,” Armstrong writes, we also need to overhaul “our whole belief system.”

Lady Justice , by Dahlia Lithwick (Penguin Press) . In a richly layered set of profiles, a noted legal correspondent chronicles efforts by female lawyers to bolster democracy during the Trump Presidency. Some figures are familiar (the voting-rights champion Stacey Abrams), others less so (a co-founder of an organization that helps refugees seeking asylum). For all these women—and for Lithwick, who writes about her own sexual harassment by a former federal judge—law isn’t an “unassailable cathedral” but a “fragile arrangement of norms, suggestions, and rules.” Constitutional progress often takes a slow, zigzagging path rather than a linear one, and it is this, Lithwick muses, that “allows it to preserve histories that might otherwise be erased.”

The English Understand Wool , by Helen DeWitt (New Directions) . An orphaned heiress, Marguerite, is kidnapped as an infant and raised in a Moroccan riad , where she is taught to appreciate exquisite tailoring, beautiful manners, classical music, tennis. Years later, the captors, having spent her fortune, disappear, and Marguerite, now seventeen, is writing a memoir about her ordeal and weathering a media maelstrom. Chapters from the work in progress alternate with exchanges between Marguerite and her increasingly exasperated New York editor, who wants a tell-all blockbuster. DeWitt offers a paean to the lost art of connoisseurship, and also a critique of the way that commercial exploitation flattens anything it does not understand.

Poūkahangatus , by Tayi Tibble (Knopf) . This collection’s title poem, which describes itself as “An Essay About Indigenous Hair Dos and Don’ts,” mixes mythological and pop-cultural references with ruminations on female beauty, power, and inheritance: Medusa makes an appearance, as does Disney’s “Pocahontas.” Elsewhere, the poet, a Māori New Zealander, uses the film “Twilight” as a lens through which to examine racialized and gendered tensions of adolescence. Tibble’s smart, sexy, slang-studded verse is fanciful and dramatic, revelling in the pains and the pleasures of contemporary young womanhood yet undergirded by an acute sense of history. Her voice remains sure-footed across many registers, and the book, at its best, functions as an atlas for learning to explore the world on one’s own terms.

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The English Understand Wool (Storybook ND Series) Kindle Edition

A modern amorality play about a 17-year-old girl, the wilder shores of connoisseurship, and the power of false friends

• Print length 61 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher New Directions
• Publication date August 16, 2022
• File size 4943 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09YP7RCPZ
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Directions (August 16, 2022)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 16, 2022
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 4943 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 61 pages
• #105 in 90-Minute Literature & Fiction Short Reads
• #1,369 in Literary Fiction (Kindle Store)
• #2,810 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Helen dewitt.

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The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt

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A tight, Talented Mr. Ripley-esque mini-thriller where the thrill is in the revelation of the narrator’s psyche through her circumstances. And it has a biting critique of the publishing industry! Helen DeWitt runs away with this priceless gem: a literary thriller that is as exciting as it is intelligent and can be read in an afternoon.

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt, (List Price: $17.95, New Directions, 9780811230070, August 2022)

Reviewed by Conor Hultman, Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

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The English Understand Wool

• Staff Reviews

"Let's suppose you are a serious person. You listen to not only Bartok & Archie Shepp but Black Midi & Yasuaki Shimizu. You know which pockets can be picked. You find it easy to convince yourself that other writers are good when you are not reading Helen DeWitt. Let's stop saying  you . I'm saying: there are no substitutes. Her books are chainsaws for the frozen seas within us."  

See all my recommendations »

A modern amorality play about a 17-year-old girl, the wilder shores of connoisseurship, and the power of false friends

Maman was exigeante—there is no English word–and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified. Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid  mauvais ton  ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?

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