Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z Danielewski – House of Leaves author returns with 1,200-page Western | imaginary

IIn this moment of cultural panic about the decline of reading, it takes an enviable confidence to hand over a volume like Tom’s Crossing. Weighing more than 1,200 pages of closely printed text, the novel contains about half a million words—almost two Ulysses novels. It is also, in this respect, twice as long as Danielowski’s first novel, House of Leaves, which secured cult status for its author when it was published 25 years ago. Tom’s Crossing is so big that when I showed it on the tube, I felt like that character on Trigger Happy TV with his huge mobile phone. “Look,” I seemed to say to passengers scrolling through Instagram on their devices, “I’m reading a book!”

The novel is not only long, it is also a challenging and deliberately ambiguous work that insists on its own epic status, yet has at its core a clear and compelling story. Callen Marsh, a 16-year-old nerdy outsider in the town of Orvop, Utah, is a preternaturally gifted horse rider. Through his shared love of horses, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with the handsome and popular Tom Gatstone.

When Tom dies of cancer, he extracts a promise from Callen to rescue the two horses they love from the Knacker’s yard. The bulk of the novel tells the story of Kalin’s quest to take these two horses, Mouse and Navidad, to safety in the wilderness beyond the Isach Mountain Range. Along the way, Callen is unexpectedly joined by Tom’s brave little sister, Landry, and, unexpectedly, by Tom’s ghost. A series of violent events raises the stakes: Orvop’s evil patriarch, Orwin Porch, owner of Porch Meats, and arch-enemy of the Gatestones, sets out to thwart Kalin’s already difficult mission.

This blunt summary does not do justice to the book’s ambition or the brilliance of its plots. The events take place over the course of five days leading up to Halloween 1982. As a pure story, Tom’s Crossing arrives in a beautiful, cinematic Western-themed setting, with an 1980s setting, youthful central characters, and sweeping landscapes. There are weapons, horses, ghosts, a primal struggle for survival in hostile territory, family feuds and a growing sense of mortal threat, as Old Porch’s ambition and psychopathy escalate the drama. And the story’s compressed time frame transitions into a very satisfying climatic showdown in the mountains.

However, for all its obvious virtues, I found Tom’s Crossing to be a confusing and often infuriating experience. Danilevsky is a writer of tremendous power and vision. He has invented an engaging story with mythological undertones that needs no further emphasis. Yet he makes a number of aesthetic choices that seem deliberately designed to frustrate normal enjoyment of the novel. One such conceit is the conceit, made clear on the first page, that the epic events described in the book are already widely known. At countless points in the novel, we step back from the action and explore the thoughts and attitudes of a wide range of named characters who used moments in the story as the basis for their own artistic works: operas, songs, sculptures, drawings, and art installations. We hear about these amazing details. There are so many of these choral characters—at one point, a thousand or so names are simply inserted into the text without comment—that I wondered whether they belonged to Danielowski’s big fans who crowdfunded the novel.

Another decision that struck me as askew was the narrative voice of the book. The novel purports to be a transcription of an oral account of the events relating to it. The sound reproduced on the page is a strange mixture of Homer and hayseed, with the “g” ending dropped on the participle, the double negative being used, and an occasional introduction to like fledHowever, he is familiar with such obscure words as cynegetic, rupestral, epicrisis, noctilucent, and teichoskopia. The result is verbosity and rambling and makes a long book seem much longer.

“Early that afternoon, when Allison’s thoughts returned angrily for some reason to the curse she had placed on Callen before he left, warning him not to use weapons, and explaining by insubstantial edict that merely carrying a gun might cost him the horses he loved, she and Sondra returned for the rest of his life to the Isach Canyon parking lot, where they immediately learned about the great rockslide.”

This passage is one of the shortest and least challenging sections of the novel, but there is still something distinctly ill-considered about the way it is structured. The warning about weapons – although relevant to the plot – has nothing to do with the unfolding event. In fact, it just distracts the reader from the essence of this paragraph, which is: Allison and Sondra return to the valley and learn about the rockslide.

Why don’t you say it like that? Well, the narrator’s voice sticks to its own dialect, with repetition and colloquialism and its own meandering rhythms. Space prevents me from quoting the strangest examples at length, but sometimes it feels as if the stranger from The Big Lebowski was channeling the gritty 17th-century prose of John Milton or Thomas Browne. You’ll remember that the Stranger had a raspy voice and a big hat, and tended to say things like: “I guess that’s how the crazy human comedy goes on through the generations. Westward, the wagons, across the sands of time, until—ah! look at me, I’m a wanderer again.” Add a reference to the Iliad and an obscure adjective, say, quaquaversal, and that’s basically the sound of Tom’s Crossing.

This narrator—whose implausible identity we learn later in the book—also possesses a kind of hyper-knowledge. There is a deep knowledge – off the top of my head – of horseback riding, geography, geology, mythology, the Mormon Bible, card games, land development, 1980s music, modern art, guns, outdoor survival, and the lore of classic literature. Furthermore, every moment in the story is broken down into second-by-second details, regardless of its importance to the plot. Sometimes, that’s great and exciting. Danielewski’s ability to visualize and convey the unfolding events is astonishing. Other times, I’m scratching my head as we disappear into another lengthy digression, wondering why I’m being told so much about secondary characters and their irrelevant enthusiasm.

In the end, Tom’s Crossing feels as if it was written with at least one eye on the literary immortality afforded by academic scholarship. Its aesthetic decisions seem designed to stimulate rather than enjoy the seminars. To be fair, Danilevsky does not hide the book’s challenges: a quick glance at the first page of the novel will let readers know what they want. Less obvious is that beneath the armor of challenging writing and literary allusion is the satisfyingly gooey center of a blockbuster PG Western, with limited nudity, violent scenes, and strangely simple moral choices.