about tom's crossing

preface, caveats, etc.

this is not really a review but more of a series of thoughts and reactions to mark z. danielewski's latest novel tom's crossing, which i'm compelled to write mostly to work through (1) how i see the novel fitting into his larger aesthetic and ethical project, and (2) why i was so supremely frustrated and disappointed with the novel in light of what appears to be (based on general online/good reads/reviews) positive concensus that this is a 'good' novel.¹ punchline is largely going to be: i don't think it worked; i don't think it substantially added anything to the above set of projects i see danielewski's work participating in; and ultimately, what i understand to be the ethico-political project at work from around the familiar to tom's crossing takes a real backstep.

your mileage may vary on what follows.

i'm going to write as if you've also read the novel. i have zero interest in summarizing here.

i have not written about literature proper in forever, so, you know. see the above.

whatever follows

0.²

i've been reading danielewski for nearly 20 years now. that's not much of a claim given his first novel came out in 2000. i do think³ i'm a well worn reader of his work in the context of literary critcism: a giant chunk of my disertation was written on the familiar; i have taught the familiar; i have done substantial research not just around his work, but i've read it all. all of which is just to say, this is not coming from a place of not being familiar with what he's been doing for the past few decades.

to make some clear claims:

• danielewski has made the claim that his work is largely a series of projects on (re)mediating various narrative aesthetic practices into literary/novelistic form. so, house of leaves is a film; only revolutions is kind of musical; the familiar is a tv series. tom's crossing is a wester. whether that factors into the above, i'm not super concerned with.
• the familiar in particular, and the various texts written around and in service of the series,⁴ begin what i see as a clear ethico-political project that amounts to something like participating in a shared reality not via empathy so much as a commitment to shared entanglement, which you can take as far as you want
• with the familiar as well as these other extra textual narratives, danielewski was building out a larger and shared narrative world between texts. technologies and characters, and even wholesale narratives that appear in one text might pop up in another. tom's crossing began as 'tom's crossing' in the open pages of the first volume of the familiar
• danielewski writes 'difficult' narratives with an emphasis on the difficulty of reading as the collaborative effort between/among reader and text. this tends to take the form of typographically challenging page layouts, but ultimately seems to serve to say something about both the novel/narrative as object in the world and on the act of reading.⁵

this is basically where i'm coming from

i am more than willing to read a long book. however, i've never been someone that's actively propelled by plot as narrative. my concern is nearly always closer to the form side of the equation. form is clearly an engine in danielewski's earlier works, especially as they force an encounter between reader and text in order to foreground the difficulty of reading. reading is not some passive exercise. and form is not just typographical -- i'm talking about the constuction of narrative as an engine for thinking about narrative differently. i'm basically thinking here about post/modernist experiments in narrative as they got taken up in the last x number of decades.

tom's crossing seems wholly uninterested in providing this kind of engine and, in fact, the novel attempts to provide an inverse engine for turning pages by design. this is a plot heavy novel: a lot happens and your ability to keep turning pages is largely related to seeing what happens next.⁶ the slow-going and ploddiness is the part and parcel with the ethical point the novel is trying to make: to do the thing (free the horses; do the correct thing) is tough, and you, the reader, need to do the tough thing with the characters to understand this. we can't just climb the mountain for you.

in itself, this is totally fine, though a deterant for someone that's not super into the plot of the novel (or who doesn't really care about plot). additionally, this engine goes hand in hand with danielewski's interest in remediation, specifically around how narratives shift and change under various aesthetic and on-the-ground constraints. here's x-hundred pages to tell a thing versus landry recounting things to the fbi agents at the end. the issue i have is that this fact about versimilitude under constraints is so obvious as to be banal, and its performance is supremely tedious, which, again, i understand, is a feature, not a bug.⁷

what i came think especailly towards the back half of the novel is that danielewski and i are parting ways on a shared ethical comittment to what entanglement looks like. simply put, i think the novel espouses a sense that the arc of history bends towards justice, and that we are players on that arc, but largely we ride it rather than actively shape it. this runs against what i saw as the ethical implications of the familiar, which compels its reader narratively and aesthetically to 'really listen' to the world around them in order to participate, cohabitate, and cocreate in more ethically sound ways.⁸ xanther listens to hear the cat. everyone else can hear it, but they don't listen closely enough, nor do they run towards it. xanther is who we ought to want to be, maybe not exactly, but in many ways that xanther is becoming xanther.

kalin and landry are riders in a larger and more explicitly epic narrative. we get it: this is pulling stuff from the odyssey and the illiad, which also kind of entails buying into a certain kind of view in which the worldly is subordinated to the extra-worldly, be it greek gods or the various capitalized nouns throughout the book. the problem for me is that the latter becomes the former, whereas i think something like the 'Good' as described throughout is a more vexing, complicated, and multiplicitous force than the novel suggests.

there's an argument that kalin and landry have to suffer for what they want, and that's what the novel is depicting. which, i'd more or less buy if we didn't have the haphazard espousals about capital-H history or capital-G good.

i like that danielewski is building out this shared world. i like the idea of narrative constructs building these texts. i love the idea of v.e.m., mostly cause i know basically nothing about it. that stuff is in here so little as to basically be absent. when cas shows up at the art show, i'm like, 'oh this is cool', and then we're done with it.

given that nothing really happened with it,⁹ why include it at all?

the art show was the singular most interesting and to my mind successful chunk of pages in the narrative and it required none of the preceding 900-ish pages to be effective. it got immediately to the idea of narrative and aesthetic constraint and laid those complications out so cleanly that i thought that this should be the novel.

i think the biggest friction i felt can be summarize by saying: this novel was not for me, even though i am a danielewski completist. some things that told me the novel was not for me:

• all of the above
• the need to claim fiction is enabling and allows us to imagine the future otherwise
• any and all of the appeals to a capital-G good especially in the face of
• very obvious critiques of organized religion and govenment as enabling fictions
• we are, all of us, haunted by ghosts known and unknown¹⁰

i am still trying to understand why i think the above is pandering. i am still trying to understand why i have such an aversion to these things, or see them as being eye-rolly. the book does not have me as its sole audience, and i am sure that, just like house of leaves opened an entire world for me, tom's crossing is going to absolutely blow a number of readers' minds.

i think i'm trying register and reckon with a disappointment in parting ways with someone i have felt an intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical kinship with for decades. i'm fine mourning this loss, but i'm also bulking at having needed to read 1200 pages to realize some things that should have probably just been obvious.