But there are better ways to think about minor things and the problem of taste. See Helen DeWitt, who writes as deftly as anyone about taste and aesthetic judgement. Herself once something like a minor writer, DeWitt saw her remarkable debut novel The Last Samurai, despite its enthusiastic reception, saved from out-of-print obscurity by a 2016 New Directions reissue after spending 16 years as a mere “cult classic” (a term with a whiff of the minor about it). The Last Samurai is a story of aesthetic education, the development of taste. It centers on a well-read and under-employed woman named Sibylla (she’s a freelance typist, what today we’d probably call a gig worker), who raises her prodigious son Ludo on a system of languages, math, and classical texts.
