The Familiar, Volume 1

I have a lot of problems with this book. While reading it was not an entirely unpleasureable experience, and thought provoking at times, I forced myself to finish the book (not sure it should correctly be called a novel).

In previous MZD works, the experimental style has complimented or added to the work. In Only Revolutions, beside the book spinning inversion, the literal and figurative entwining of the two narratives stitched two perspectives together. Revolutions wasn't much of a narrative, but served as a beautiful and interesting art object, just long enough to surrender to its gimmick and experience it at a go. In House of Leaves, the neurotic commentary and footnoting layered narratives to make a haunted house story very haunted. And those were, in my opinion, fairly successful in their experimental pursuits. Part of that success comes from the containment of the experience: revolutions is a simple story, a tight story, and HoL, despite its multiple narratives maintains the labyrinthian structure circling around the central plot and adding to it. Except for some loose ends, purposeful ambiguities, the book drives inward, deeper. The experimental elements of the book were focused, they worked to change the engagement with the text.

In some ways, TF tries to do both of these things. The meta-commentary, correcting, adding, unaware that it itself is subject to higher editors makes an appearance, as do the multiple narratives. But they don't really work: fundamentally, the structures are sound, but in the exploded context of this 800 page time they are underused and underutilized. There's really just too much, too many characters (6,7 narrative perspectives? More?). And they're largely wasted space - the individual characters are underdeveloped and the stylistic experiments that could elevate them don't deliver an alternate source of satisfaction. The flourishes just don't have enough of an effect: the anwar chapters, parentheses and brackets, doesn't hold up when compared to a simpler stream of consciousness; the patois of the jingjing chapters have no narrative grounding to justify the illegibility of the text; the spheres, the interesting tidbits of scifi promising some sense of a plot to this monster of a book, bring little relevance to the actual reading of the text (except, perhaps, hurting my eyes). The book reads like an introduction chapter bloated and stretched out over 800 pages.

I could harp some more: the dreadful jingjing chapters, the ridiculous (and omnipresent) pop culture references, how heavy the book was (it's really heavy), but I think I've made enough of a point.

I think writing 10+ volumes of this is absurd. It is an experiment in prose form that I will no longer participate in. Perhaps if MZD hires a editor (or two) I could convince myself to get future installments from a library. It is unfortunate that commitment to this ill devised magnum opus will make other self contained (better) works unlikely for the foreseeable future.

Danielewski's weird experimental novels — structurally weird, narratively weird, typographically weird -- always seem get one star or five stars from readers, with nothing in between. I fall in the five stars camp. I eat this stuff up.

This is is the first volume of a story that will supposedly run to 27 volumes. It’s 800 pages. The story, such that is is, is of a young epileptic girl who on a single rainy day in May finds a mysterious kitten. It’s set in multiple typefaces and colors and languages and is told from nine different points of view. Some of those points of view are plotless and meandering, some are in multilingual patois, some are full of inter-sentence digressions that go down multiple levels and then come up again. I have heard that the Kindle version preserves all the typographical and structural ticks of the story, but honestly, although I love my Kindle I think this book works better on paper.

It is an art object and a difficult book, but it’s also compulsively readable — much closer to MZD's wonderful House of Leaves than the painfully difficult Only Revolutions. In some ways it reminds me of David Mitchell’s the Bone Clocks. The Bone Clocks had similar interleaving narratives, different points of view, and the suggestion of alternative time- and space-spanning universes. The Familiar is like the Bone Clocks turned up to 11 and with a slant toward the surreal.

The characters are for the most part very richly drawn — especially Xanther and her parents — but I had trouble following the plot lines of the minor characters. I sometimes had to go back and reread sections to remember what was going on when a new section started and who these people were. (fortunately, all the characters are color coded, so it was easy to skip back and forth.) Some of the minor character sections feel very thin, and there was one section in the middle that goes completely meta in a “whaaaaa” kind of way. But overall: I liked the story, I was challenged and intrigued by the structure, and I’m on board for the other 26 volumes.