Mark Z. Danielewski published his new novel Tom’s Crossing in October of last year, so there is a way in which this text comes late, too late to say anything of substance, too late to sell any books, too late to call forth admiring sneers of agreement. In another way, however, Tom’s Crossing is itself such a late book that there can be no other way of writing about it than tardily—en retard—once a certain owl has already taken flight. For one thing, the text itself is so very long that, as William Gaddis complained about reviewers of The Recognitions, to write about it on a tight editorial timeline would necessarily mean not engaging with the book on anything but a shallow level.

Tom’s Crossing is 1,229 densely packed deckle-edged pages long. There is no hint of the postmodern fireworks of Danielewski’s first novel, the enormously successful House of Leaves. That book was the alchemical marriage between something like the nouveau roman as composed by an MFA epigone of Alain Robbe-Grillet or Georges Perec and a Stephen King doorstopper, but it also seemed to arise from a certain naivete about the salvific quality of canonically postmodern methods (i.e., influenced by and proceeding forth from Pynchon, Gaddis, Nabokov, Gass, Barth in the hopes that conceiving of the world anew would save “us” from the inherent conservatism of realistic description). Young writers of the nineties read Gravity’s Rainbow and Pale Fire, then began to write weird, filled with the same guileless enthusiasm that had once put synthesizers into the hands of so many rock bands. Among other things, House of Leaves tells the story of an infinitely, impossibly large house, which, when observed from the outside, looks to be of average size. In that earlier novel, the text caterwauls across the page, thinning and thickening at will, changing color, giving way to images and photographs and collages, bringing to mind a complaint a beloved poetry professor of mine had about novels: “There’s just not enough white space on the page!” To wit, in House of Leaves, there is more than enough white space on the page and the reader whips through the book, ego tickled by postmodern play, even as they don’t really have to work for their dinner.

Danielewski followed House of Leaves up with 2006’s Only Revolutions, really a work of prose poetry in a Finnegans Wake vein, with words of many colors, discrete columns of text, etc. The book was not a particular success, but neither did it aim to be. It was a “difficult second album”—a response to the acclaim of an earlier item with bellicose belligerence, a demand that the reader marvel at the unorthodox unpredictability of the author’s intellect. Much more bitter for the author must have been The Familiar, a proposed 27-volume work of extraordinary typographical hyperactivity, for which Danielewski even won a seven-figure advance from Pantheon. The Familiar was intentionally modeled after TV shows like Battlestar Galactica and Breaking Bad, the notion being that, if viewers glued to the boob tube were willing to come back for hundreds of hours of content, why would readers of literary fiction not wish for a similar narcotic—not penny dreadfuls or Dickensian sentimentalism, but 27 one-thousand-page books about a magical cat, peopled by a rotating cast of characters scattered throughout Los Angeles and beyond, some of the chapters written in the same Wakeian gibberish patois as Only Revolutions. Alas, this book was not a success in terms of sales and the series was cancelled after the first five volumes, Danielewski retreating to his Los Angeles abode to lick his wounds—like his aborted series’ titular cat—and, ostensibly, to plot his next move.

To the extent that The Familiar was a statement about how literature must evolve in order to keep up with the changing mores of an increasingly visual culture—the visuality of the hyperactive typography in particular making it very easy to zip through 1,000 pages of feline globe-trotting, not ever really understand what the fuck was going on—Tom’s Crossing, a book first mentioned in the back matter of the first volume of The Familiar (some fans even going so far as to suggest that it is an expansion and redevelopment of an earlier attempt at a first novel) harkens back to a time when books were simply books and readers would raptly follow text on page with no additional inducements. The style of the book is sub-sub-sub-sub-Faulknerian, a TV cowboy pastiche in which every “-ing” is truncated. The book begins: “Hard to figure how so much awful horror could’ve started out with just them two horses and not a one yet named, both mindin their own business on that spring afternoon near the Tree Streets, nosin hay scraps at the back of Paddock A, with the new kid mindin his own business too, … also nibblin on a blade of grass.”

You get the idea.

There are postmodern tics and tropes, but they are buried within the text rather than jabbing forth from its surface. The title page does not list the author as Mark Z. Danielewski, but as one “E.L.M.,” also indicating that the book was transcribed by another whose name is scudded out. But the book’s most obtrusive postmodern tic is the Greek chorus of characters constantly commenting on the events of the text as if they were Talmudic scholars:

Now there are a handful who swear that this was their true bindin moment. Llewellyn Bailey and Carter Roylance, to name just two, would get in quite the argument outside Farrer Junior High. Llewellyn mowed the Roylances’ lawn, and Carter’s sisters babysat for the Baileys as well as the Apples and the Trunnells. Llewellyn would swear it was the handshake, while Carter would hold tight to the exchangin of names. By contrast, Shamayne Apple would wind up arguin with her younger sister, them two squallin out in front of the Erville Family Mortuary of all places, swearin that the only moment that mattered was when Kalin declared his gratitude.

This happens on practically every other page of the book, if not every page, and none of the characters ever recur or attain any sort of significance to the reader. These markedly common people (like extras just barely excised from DFW’s The Pale King) with their thoughts and opinions on the story announce the book’s Iliadic pretentions—they are a Greek chorus, and they intentionally intimate the notion that Danielewski’s tale must be one of great national and popular import. To further bolster this notion, near the end of the book, there are two scenes in which, within the world of the book, galleries are filled up with artistic representations of the events of the narrative in various mediums. These works of art are commented on as if critically.

The reader guffaws.

The book’s heft, an insult to the forearm, suggests an expansive vision, spanning epochs, landmasses, dimensions of spacetime—but no. The book takes place in 1982, over the course of about a week, in and around a Utah town called Orvop, an anagram of Provo, the fourth-largest city in Utah. It tells the story of an unpopular boy, Kalin, who has a semisecret friendship with a very popular boy, Tom. The popular boy dies of cancer quickly enough, in the book’s first few pages, and, on his deathbed, his friend Kalin promises him to free those two horses from Paddock A, already quoted above, shabby little things soon to be butchered by their owner, a certain “Old Porch” who is both a formidably evil patriarch of an all-male family and the book’s antagonist, then to take them across a mountain crossing—hence the book’s title. Tom’s adopted sister catches up to Kalin and joins him on his quest, as does Tom’s ghost. As the book goes on and the two scrappy teens at its center are hunted down by Old Porch and his various Porchy offspring, its world grows more and more supernatural and the specters increase steadily in number.

As if to be sure of hitting its deranged length, collapsed timeline notwithstanding, Danielewski’s prose is photorealistically descriptive in a mode that acts as molasses against the reader’s ability to zip through the text, which, Faulknerian pretentions and postmodern wingdings aside, is written in a way that is almost indistinguishable from a YA novel or, more charitably, a potboiler by Stephen King. That isn’t necessarily an insult. But the agglomeration of unnecessary detail is incredible:

Who knows how Tom would find out, but somehow he’d get wind that Old Porch was away or his hands were otherwise occupied at Porch Meats or at some of the other Porch properties, and then Tom would get word to Kalin and they’d meet at Paddock A on Willow and Oak, Tom bringin two saddles, halter-bridles, reins, and bits. Early on he brought an extra pair of black boots, which he made Kalin keep. Tom’s daddy once wore them, and as Tom had correctly guessed, they proved a perfect fit. Kalin accepted the gift, though he only wore them when he rode with Tom.

Or here, a fraction of the description of the intended crossing (now that Navidad and Mouse are the names of the two horses nearly butchered by Old Porch for Porch Meats):

Now back to this matter of orography: in fairness to Shadow’s Glen, it was hard to imbue much significance in near anythin, whether meadow or dangerous bluff, if it lay below the Katanogos massif proper, them loomin cluster of peaks so towerin, they was like skies unto themselves, each with a world of its own, not only dwarfin the likes of Agoneeya, Kaieneewa, or any of the other Isatch mountains for that matter, but encompassin too what millions of years had laid at its distant feet, includin forests and glacial lakes, ever announcin them high walls with numerous cols and jagged passages, gifts to every strong-hearted interloper set on sleuthin out any number of nameless paths, which, if Kalin could just reach one, as Tom might’ve said, well then, all bets were off, the odds evened, and maybe in Kalin’s favor, grantin him, Navidad and Mouse easy passage to Tom’s Crossin.

The trouble was what waited between Shadow’s Glen and the craggy-tree-filled-backcountry freedom Kalin would need to reach. That part of the journey weren’t more than a series of long switchbacks that steadily rose up as they’d head east of Agoneeya, leavin behind the bouldered and walled terminus of Isatch Canyon. At any other time, that way would’ve presented the most appealin invitation. However, rumor was that several sections of those paths had collapsed, impedin not only all vehicles but hikers too.

I leave this passage unabridged so that the reader might get a sense of how the text actually operates. Danielewski, it seems, is not acting as a writer here, but as a hoarder of phrases, the more redolent of a vanished “Western” mode of living, the better. The prose doesn’t even bother to be handsome. Instead, it is content to be jaggedly busy. To contain as much as possible.

The cardinal sin of Tom’s Crossing is that it is more interesting as a conceptual object than as a text that must actually be read and experienced by the reader.

Upon its initial release, Tom’s Crossing was reviewed in very few outlets. Its sole blurb is by Stephen King. To me, the lucky recipient of a galley, the book’s TV cowboy language did not presage success. And yet it became a New York Times bestseller and has attracted great plaudits from ordinary readers across the internet. To my mind, the success of the book within Danielewski’s readership makes it a far more interesting object than if it had simply sunk, as I expected. Do these Goodreads reviewers somehow have the ability to X-ray through the book’s excessive length, its ropier elements, its DFW-esque gesturing at the notion of a Greek chorus? Are the book’s formal gambits gristle on the edge of a steak and the filet mignon at the center is the YA novel Stephen King seems to also have access to, as evidenced in his blurb? “At the heart you’ll find a blood-drenched story of pursuit and two brave and resourceful children. But there’s so much more,” he writes, his words gigantic on the expensive hardcover’s backside, nothing above them but the book’s catchphrase: “NO ONE TALKS TO THE DEAD FOR FREE.”

Perhaps I am an uncharitable bastard, but I’ve always gotten a certain vibe from Danielewski: that, for him, the avant-garde is window dressing and underneath the foil and garlands, it’s Hallmark all the way down. Danielewski stretches and extends himself, the postmodern tics and tropes becoming a form of aesthetic striving. He is not reining himself in, the difficulty of his subject matter demanding the style of his text—he is willing himself out to sea, ornamenting the simple stories he wants to tell with decorative elements taken from other novels, novels in which, one would hope, those elements of formal experimentation represent a foundational element of the project and not a mere bumper sticker. Here, I think of the 20th-century German-language canon of long novels, all of them devastated experiments, attempts to articulate thoughts beyond the reach of what literature is capable of: The Man Without Qualities, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Bottom’s Dream, Perrudja, River without Shore. Hans Henny Jahnn was able to complete neither Perrudja nor River without Shore, just as Robert Musil couldn’t get to the end of his The Man Without Qualities. I also love the image of the bourgeois Peter Weiss writing himself into the history of the German Resistance, writing on the shore of a Swedish lake, a very neurotic man who’s only just suffered a heart attack—the only thing he does other than write is complain to the local authorities about the excessive speed and noisiness of the motorboats out on the lake … But that is neither here nor there.

These writers were following the dictates of a higher form of knowledge or an impossible aesthetic gambit, the books difficult to understand and impossible to summarize. But one never gets the sense that they are overplaying their hands. When I asked Michael Lentz what he thought had gone wrong with The Man Without Qualities—what had prevented Musil from completing it—he told me it was Musil’s “excessive diligence—especially given that he learned it from Thomas Mann.” This brings to mind the transcendental revolution that Kant represented within the world of philosophy. Before Kant, it was possible to write philosophy in somewhat “normal” language, whereas, afterwards, the language had to formally represent its transcendental content. The age-old undergrad lament about Hegel—“What would it say in plainer prose, much more unadorned??”—misses the whole point. With these Germans, simplicity of form is rendered impossible by complexity of content. But what we have here before us is an American. So, why waffle on about the Germans? Well, to have before us an American changes precisely zip, zilch. Same difference. The cardinal sin of Tom’s Crossing is that it is more interesting as a conceptual object than as a text that must actually be read and experienced by the reader. The book is an empty carapace, an enormous eggshell miraculously deprived of white and yolk. Nothing to sink your teeth into. Nothing to crack into the frying pan. But, here again, I am equivocating. Tom’s Crossing has found far more rapturous readers than any of the books I’ve ever translated have. It is this enigma that keeps me from dismissing the book outright.

At the same time, I am certain it is a novel more haunted by ghosts outside of the text than the ghosts within it. Which ghosts? Given the attempt at a narrative voice in dialect, any reader worth even half their salt will sense the spirit of Faulkner and his Yoknapatawpha County, just as the book’s excessive length and naive attitude toward children bring to mind the book’s blurber and his It. Again, however, I wonder how King managed to read through the postmodern elements of the book and see into the YA narrative he was so moved by (like Danielewski’s many readers online who write about how they wept in the book’s final third). But King’s books are more lively in their storytelling instincts and their engagement with the detritus of daily life, the latter seeming to presage certain elements of Karl Ove Knausgård’s much more high-brow project. More ghosts: I think of William T. Vollmann and his unfinished Seven Dreams cycle, themselves already a kind of conceptual headstone commemorating the victims of colonial projects in what was once the New World. But Vollmann’s formal intensity never seems excessive or unnecessary. Like the transcendental philosophers after Kant, he is allowing his content to dictate the complexity of his form, like in The Dying Grass, which stages an entirely new formatting structure on the page itself in order to render the Nez Perce War as a stage comprising around 1,300 pages, with dueling streams of dialogue, human interiorities alongside the exteriorities, or his insertion of his own voice into the novels under the guise of a seer named William the Blind. Vollmann is not much older than Danielewski, and yet he seems to come from an earlier generation, one much nearer to King and even Faulkner. He belongs to an era when the novel was given a great deal more importance as a form of national pronouncement, an era when something like the Great American Novel was possible—when the very notion of the Great American Novel came into being.

I will not be breaking any new ground when I say that the novel has hemorrhaged prestige even among educated people. But not enough people are able to go a step further and wonder how the reduced importance of the novel might damage writers’ very ability to produce new texts. I think, for instance, of the difference between Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, the former a terrifying proclamation about war and civilization, leaving neither Axis nor Allies unscathed, and the latter taking the formal elements of the former and using them to craft an epic that isn’t really about anything and, even as it has a great deal to recommend to it, leaves readers with little more than the vague recollection of a Sino-Jesuit alliance and of George Washington smoking weed. Between the two books, even within the work of the same writer, our American literary culture lost the capacity to sustain living masterpieces, leaving writers to instead ape the external attributes of previous works of genius. So, even as those ghosts haunt Danielewski, urge him forth to higher peaks, up to the impossible crossing of the novel’s title, nags trailing behind, these crags he might wish to ascend remain fundamentally inaccessible to him. In that sense, the closest cousin to Tom’s Crossing in the current literary landscape would be King Sorrow, a novel by Stephen King’s son Joe Hill, also released in October 2025 and basically borrowing the exact structure of It, but, again, with none of the juice Hill’s dad’s books once had. Hill and Danielewski go through the motions, attempt to attain a certain scale, but there is no cultural impetus behind their impulse to write, write, write…

Look, I’m sorry: I’m almost done. I’m cutting myself off. I’m rooting for Danielewski here, I really am. I’m on his team. I want him to find a subject that allows him to flex his formal muscles without it seeming like a put-on. A bumper sticker. I want to read a book by him that is as interesting in the experience of reading as it is in its conceptual carapace. I want a book with no TV-cowboy catch phrases like “Enuf is enuf,” the bathetic plagal cadence that ends the very last page of Tom’s Crossing. I’m even rooting for Joe Hill and his daddy issues. I bought King Sorrow from a Hudson News in Baltimore before a long flight and tried to read it on the plane, not even able to get through a single chapter. I wish I could read these books and enjoy them. Be immersed in them. I wish I could.

I think I remember a semi-ironic DFW line about how the problem with TV isn’t that it’s too entertaining—it’s that it isn’t entertaining enough.

Yeah.

That’s exactly it.

That’s what I want to end the piece with.

The only issue is I can’t find the quote anywhere. No record of it.

Anyway.

If we inhabit a post-empire¹ era of no Great American Novels, then is a little entertainment too much to ask for?

Long Live the Golden Age of TV.