Monsterpieces: Danielewski

Tom’s Crossing

Pantheon, 2025

(Los Angeles Review of Books)

[LARB does not allow posting of its reviews on Substack, but they allow posting a few teaser paragraphs and a link to the full, long review:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/enuf-is-enuf/

As with my review of Shadow Ticket, I’m posting reviews of earlier long Danielewski novels for context should anyone be interested.]

In the beginning of Big Fiction, there were encyclopedic novels and mega novels and then maximal novels. With Mark Z. Danielewski’s 1232-page Tom’s Crossing, we have the supermax, a term most commonly describing huge prisons with no escape, no variety of existence, and few relations with the outside world. Prison critics call supermax facilities, with their frequent solitary confinement, excessively inhumane. Like the long novels of the 1970s and 1980s that I wrote about in my 1989 book The Art of Excess, Danielewski’s supermax is excessive but very different from those earlier works. The excesses of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), J R (1975), The Public Burning (1977), and the four others I discussed were generally caused by a hypertrophy of some innovative literary technique, such as Brechtian alienation effects in the epic theater of Gravity’s Rainbow. Rather than innovative, the excess of Tom’s Crossing is retrograde, a hypertrophy of specificity in traditional narrative and realist style.

Since I wrote The Art of Excess, I’ve been on the lookout for other Big Fictions. In 2010, I published an essay called “Prodigious Fiction” about novels by the next generation of maximalists: William Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991), and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996). All three novels were about prodigies, and all were prodigious in intellectual scale. One could see the cybernetic influence of Pynchon in each, but they weren’t excessive, not the way Tom’s Crossing is. Neither were Danielewski’s previous long works, House of Leaves (2000) and the five volumes of The Familiar (2015), which reveled in multiplicity—in plots, characters, forms, styles, visual layouts. Tom’s Crossing is much longer than any of the earlier novels I’ve mentioned but at the same time reductive in its over-elaborations of the conventional.

Unlike the world-building and information-gathering characteristic of two generations of maximalist novels, Tom’s Crossing is locale-remembering and story-telling. With its narrow setting, compressed chronological plot, and overload of minute detail, the novel is like a supermax prison where one must serve a long sentence with little variety and very limited contact with the world outside the walls of the story. In this era of reduced attention spans, when readers of literary fiction are tempted to stray to other forms of entertainment, Danielewski wagers on his ability to bring readers into and hold them within a work that will demand weeks, probably, of attention. In his 2017 book The Cruft of Fiction: Mega Novels and the Science of Paying Attention, David Letzler claims that mega novels’ meandering excess of detail—what he calls cruft, a programming term—is valuable because it trains the readers’ attention to separate the significant from the insignificant. This is not the case with Tom’s Crossing, for it appears to ask readers for the same word-to-word, page-to-page attention that they would give a late novel by Henry James. Otherwise, readers would risk missing, for example, the one sentence midway through that indirectly identifies the mysterious putative author and narrator of the book. The supermax imposes the law—of diminishing returns.

The Familiar

Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May

Pantheon, 2015

(New York Times Book Review)

Volume 2: Into the Forest

Pantheon, 2015

(American Book Review)

Turning thought into writing is an “alchemical wonder” says Mark Z. Danielewski, America’s foremost literary magus. He doesn’t just transform leaden narratives such as the haunted house tale in House of Leaves and the teen romance in Always Revolutions. He transmutates the pages of base books into rare new forms and formats. Alchemists of the past became cult figures by both keeping and revealing secrets. Danielewski actively uses social media to supplement his novels’ cryptic designs, and his website encourages followers to post recondite explications of his works. But MZD or Z, as he signs his books, is no mere masked Internet phenomenon. After one of his college readings, I witnessed cultists clutching ragged texts form a signing line worthy of the TSA.

I don’t know any secret handshakes, but I consider House of Leaves the most ingenious, profound, and important novel published by an American this century. Think of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” with a bottomless basement that must be explored again and again. Imagine a scholarly analysis of a movie about such a story, a polymathic text that haunts the hipster who finds it in a trunk. Consider that he is Nabokov unreliable and that his deranged mother may have inspired him to write the “found” text. Fill out with lists, footnotes, photo collages, poems, and typographical experiments not imagined by Sterne in Tristram Shandy. These funhouse games and Escher tricks all contribute to the novel’s fracking exploration of the etymology of profound--the deep, the uncanny abyss beneath the prisonhouse of language, film, and, possibly, life. House of Leaves is important because it demonstrates that the methods of concrete poetry and the techniques of Internet hypertext can alchemize line-bound, hidebound fiction and thereby attract a large cohort of passionate young readers who might otherwise be playing video games.

“Nothing Succeeds Like Excess” has been my motto since 1973 when I read Gravity’s Rainbow, a work alluded to in The Familiar. House of Leaves is 700 pages. The Familiar is about 880 (some pages are unnumbered), but it is only “Volume 1” of an announced 27-volume work! Volume 2 is scheduled for publication in November. Danielewski has said the project is a “remediation” of television series such as Twin Peaks and Breaking Bad, to which he refers in the novel. But with its prefatory trailers, rolling final credits, and multiple stories in widely separated locations--Singapore, Mexico, Texas, and Los Angeles—this volume of The Familiar more resembles Altman-inflected movies such as Crash and Babel. Or the time- and place-skipping novels of David Mitchell, except that all of Danielewski’s narratives occur on May 10, 2014, “One Rainy Day in May” as his subtitle has it. A reference to “the sublime music of time” may also suggest Danielewski aims to surpass the combined seventeen volumes of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

To support that kind of ambition, Danielewski will probably need more than his loyalists of the outré and experimental, so almost half of The Familiar solicits readers who like their fiction family-oriented, mostly realistic, and slightly sentimental. His lead is Xanther, a clumsy twelve-year-old epileptic who voices odd perceptions and asks precocious questions of her father, a computer-game designer, and mother, a would-be psychotherapist. On a day it’s raining cats and dogs in L.A., Xanther goes to pick up her new dog but on the way uses something like extrasensory perception to rescue a kitten. Although some sentences about Xanther have Jamesian qualifications and Faulknerian parentheticals, the long and detailed story of her day could be a novel for young adults who, not far removed from children’s books, would appreciate visual sketches of rain and words sprinkled on pages.

Danielewski’s attention to Xanther and her parents reminds us that “family” is associated with the adjective “familiar.” But as a noun, “familiar” once meant a demon, often in the form of an animal, attending a witch. That meaning seems relevant to the novel’s most unfamiliar set of chapters where a thief named Jingjing accompanies a cat-owning crone, a mysterious “healer” who is also an epileptic, to the home of a Singapore billionaire with a drug-damaged son. To reinforce the exoticism of his materials, Danielewski invents a nearly opaque pidgin English, interspersed with Russian and Chinese printed characters. Two other sets of chapters also have magus figures: a Mexican animal smuggler named Isandorno who is called a “brujo,” (320) and an elderly couple living off the grid in Marfa, Texas, to evade discovery of their “Orb,” which seems to be a computer program that can predict the future. Billy is an alchemist working with asters; Cas is identified as “Wizard” in the author’s notes.

Between the normal and paranormal are three remaining sets of chapters that introduce L.A. subcultures: a narrative in urban dialect and Spanish about a gang leader’s contracted murder of a young nerd, a story in primer English about an Armenian taxi driver who assists a scholar of Armenian genocide, and the meditations of a detective of Turkish descent investigating a murder. Listening to the radio, Xanther roves through very different stations each with its own call letters, an analog for the irregular order and simultaneity of Danielewski’s 30 chapters with their identifying fonts and color codes.

The possibly grandiose audacity and heterogeneity of The Familiar tantalize. But it’s no stand-alone initial offering of a modest trilogy or tetralogy. If The Familiar is really the first of 27 volumes, we’re in the very early stage of exposition and probably shouldn’t expect much plot or many linkages to emerge just yet. The couple with the Orb mention Snowden and appear to be members of an international hacking group, and the couple, along with Xanther and Ozgur the detective, know about a dismemberment in Chinatown, so the series may develop into a murder mystery with national security implications. But for now we have to be content—or not--with pregnant repetitions, thematic connections, and verbal associations. Each of the major characters hears a faint “cry for help” none can identify. Xanther responds and saves the life of a cat. The Orbists may be trying to save the world from some data cataclysm. The Armenians are attempting to preserve the oral history of a catastrophe, and the crone in Singapore is begged to save the billionaire’s catatonic son.

Danielewski wants to save the tired “old form” of fiction from stodgy obsolescence by combining his new TV accessibility and his usual hypertext visuals. He continues to play with typography, but it is less radical and more indexical than in House of Leaves. Although The Familiar contains many more enigmatic photo collages for cultists to puzzle over, less compulsive decoders may feel free to skip these chapter and section markers to get on with the next story. Except for the collages and an anomalous, meta-chapter on fiction as software programming, The Familiar generally substitutes linearity for the density of House of Leaves. That first novel stacked up every possible interpretation of itself. The Familiar hustles onward like Zanther switching stations.

Danielewski got out of the House with the road romance of Always Revolutions, which has a narrow band of historical references on the inner edge of each page. The Familiar continues this outward direction; its materials are mostly public, definitely contemporary, and studiously multi-ethnic. Although some chapters employ idiosyncratic vernacular styles, they don’t always manage to defamiliarize, as the Russian Formalists said art must, the novel’s Los Angeles, which often seems derived from the L.A. depicted in movies and television. Detective Ozgur compares himself to noir gumshoes, and gang leader Luther is very aware of his role and image. These imitations of simulacra of stereotypes may be postmodern to the third power, but in future volumes I’d like to see characters from other settings penetrate and disrupt Danielewski’s familiar L.A. He has said serial publication will give him the opportunity to adjust his project according to reader feedback. This reader’s advice: do less with Xanther and more with the Orbists whose interests are explicitly intellectual and technological, the strengths of House of Leaves.

Despite my disappointment that The Familiar is not the first story of The Tower of Leaves, I realize that unless Danielewski has discovered the alchemists’ secret elixir of life he can’t spend the decade that went into building House of Leaves on any one volume of a hypertrophied serial. His crowded and inventive pilot show has me curious about his characters’ futures and how he will connect them. It’s difficult to evaluate a work barely in progress, but I’m definitely in for Volume 2. If Danielewski can complete even part of his grand project, its scale and range and variety could well compete with high-end television series and compensate for the qualities of House of Leaves that needed to be sacrificed. Alchemists like the fabled Trismegistus and the self-named Paracelsus produced shelves of volumes. I hope Danielewski can bring off the long-running magus act of The Familiar.

****

Danielewski’s second volume, Into the Forest, runs as long—at 880 pages—as One Rainy Day in May. But the number of pages is somewhat misleading because design features leave a considerable amount of blank space on most pages. House of Leaves, Danielewski’s first extra large novel, sometimes had only a word or two on a page, but many pages were also exceptionally dense, font and spacing and margins reduced to cram in his learned references. Looking back on the big American novels of the 1970s and 1980s that I wrote about in The Art of Excess—works such as J R, Women and Men, The Public Burning—and excessive novels that have succeeded them (Underworld, The Gold Bug Variations, Infinite Jest), I think an important element they have in common, besides hypertrophy, is extravagant linguistic density. By that I don’t mean just many words per page but stylistic, formal, and referential methods that created vast intra- and inter-textual systems using sometimes multiple meanings of words connecting across hundreds of pages. Probably the title of Barth’s LETTERS, as well as its creating a sequel to his six previous novels, best exemplifies the palimpsest or crossword or network kind of verbal density I mean.

These novels presented the difficulty of processing huge databases before e-books allowed readers to do word searches. Though not as linguistically dense, Danielewski’s two volumes may be more difficult because they set readers a less familiar task: to also process the spaces between and around words—the different page designs for each of his nine alternating stories, variations on certain crucial icons, the photographic collages that separate chapters, and various other visual materials including some black on black pages. A metaphor for this difficulty and, perhaps, for The Familiar as a whole occurs about half way through Into the Forest when Danielewski presents a full-page line drawing of 12 pet cages, 3 high and 4 wide. They create a relatively dense grid like the systems novels I’ve mentioned. In the following pages, the cages are partly open and then fully open, leaving white spaces for readers to notice, connect with other open spaces, and interpret. For Danielewski, blank space is not just background. In the communications loop, no message is itself a message. Combining the digital and analog, The Familiar resembles two encyclopedic novels by women--Le Guin’s Always Coming Home and Yamashita’s I Hotel. A book about these three works might be titled The Excess of Art.

In both volumes of The Familiar, it’s not just the empty spaces on pages that challenge readers. It’s also the many gaps—geographical and cultural and narrative—between the characters and stories. Like One Rainy Day in May, Into the Forest does give readers a familiar core with the family story of Xanther, her mother Astair, and her father Anwar, whose narrations lock into one another and take up about half the book. The cat that Xanther rescued is now recognized as old and ill, the extrasensory perception that allowed Xanther to find the cat develops into her psychokinetic ability to open doors, and cat’s eyes become the crucial symbolic design in the book. I understand that Danielewski needs an essentially realistic (and possibly paranormal) core to solicit the wide readership his publisher will require to keep this ambitious project going, and I realize the relationship between animals and humans is a developing theme here, but I still think spending so many pages on a cat and its effects will test the patience of many who don’t watch cat videos on the Internet.

Into the Forest also connects Xanther’s family to what I found the most interesting and promising sections in volume 1, the story of Cas, Bobby, and the electronic Orb that Cas uses to glimpse the past (where she spies the “rainbow child” Xanther) and scry the future. It’s still not clear what this aged couple and their mysteriously murdered associates are up to, but their enemies’ pursuit of Cas and Bobby creates a dramatic plot with apocalyptic overtones. If Danielewski is learning from TV, as he says, an influence here might be the long-running 24.

Two other seemingly unrelated sections in volume 1—those about Luther the L.A. gang leader and Isandorno the Latin American animal smuggler—also come together in a familiar televisual way when we find both characters are working for a drug smuggler named “The Mayor” who has, like Chapo Guzman, a private zoo. Danielewski includes a scene where The Mayor drops a baby into a deep fat fryer, something you can’t do on TV.

Gaps still predominate though. Detective Ozgur seems to be waiting in the wings, perhaps to connect the hacker plot of Cas and Bobby with the drug plot. As in volume 1, the Armenian cab-driver Shnorhk has only a minor and unexplained role here. The most distant and opaque sections of One Rainy Day in May, those about the Singaporean addict-thief Jingjing, are even more culturally removed and stylistically blurred in Into the Forest even though he is now, like Xanther, searching for a lost cat. If the characters in volume 1 were like separate trees, not much of the forest is visible in volume 2. But as I said about One Rainy Day in May, if Danielewski really has 25 more volumes in mind The Familiar is still in a very early stage of exposition.

Because I love big books, I accept the present disconnectedness of The Familiar, but I am beginning to wonder if long-form, high-end television is that useful a model for lengthy literary fiction. The textual archive seemed Danielewski’s model in House of Leaves and Always Revolutions. They were informationally and intellectually, as well as linguistically, dense. The Familiar is thin. Astair, a psychotherapist in training, reads books about cats; Anwar refers to computer games; Cas and Bobby know hacking and drugs; Ozgur is a reader of crime fiction. These characters provide little intellectual depth to the proceedings, and other characters contribute nothing.

The novels of excess I’ve mentioned were all deeply informed and sourced, generally in science, particularly in systems theory, also in history. Characters in more recent long novels by Powers, Wallace, Vollmann, and Joshua Cohen, for example, are often prodigies of learning. All these authors responded to the age of informational overload by incorporating it as subject and as method. Perhaps The Familiar is responding to a new age of visual media overload with very concretely represented (but not big-thinking) characters (such as Luther and Jingjing) who will accumulate more weight as they gain exposure in later shows in seasons to come. Where the artists of excess produced complex works with explicit informational components, such as rocketry in Gravity’s Rainbow, Danielewski seems to be relying on complicated plotting with implicit (or latent) materials--the imagistic in page design and in character presentation. Whether or not this strategy will hold readers who are accustomed to investing time and effort in big books because they are linguistically dense and conceptually sophisticated remains to be seen. Maybe a rapporteur will emerge to help readers see big ideas presumably underlying The Familiar.

Reading One Rainy Day in May, I was tantalized by the novelty and ambition of Danielewski’s project. Once his chapter designs became more familiar, and once the colloquial styles of several sections became less unfamiliar, I began to worry about all that empty space around the words. Does it suggest a profound relation between background and foreground, or does it represent a relative paucity of substance? In Into the Forest, Danielewski refers to The Wire as an example of long-form TV. In its first season, as I remember, the audience was immersed in the often puzzling secret world of drug sales. In later seasons, the director David Simon explored the causes of the drug culture, the impoverished educational system and the corrupt politics of Baltimore. I hope Danielewski has similar plans to eventually fill in the blank conceptual spaces of The Familiar. If not, it could turn out to be more Hypertrophied Entertainment than Big Book.