The Familiar, Volume 1

February 9, 2015
Set mostly in the L.A. area during a rainy day in May, our first heroine in this metanarrative of typographical trickery is the precocious 12-year-old Xanther, who embarks, with her stepfather, Anwar, on a trip to get a dog—instead, they find a kitten dying in the rain and Xanther’s desperate attempts to save it are intercut with unspooling story fragments. There’s Anwar’s past as developer of a mysterious game engine, his vanished partner Mefisto, and copious hints that reality itself might be a dream or program. Other story lines include the cyberpunk adventures of two programmers in Marfa, Tex., on the run from their own creation; a dogfighter named Victor on the verge of encountering a miracle; a repentant criminal in Singapore; an ace detective named Oz—and so forth. The narratives pile on (each with its own signature font), though none of them of contain any real significance or a three-dimensional character. Danielewski’s (House of Leaves) interest is clearly not in storytelling, but in faux profundity; hence the book’s multitude of wise-sounding quotations, random punctuation, fake code, blank pages, cheap pop-cultural citations, and The Matrix–aping techno-clichés make for familiar reading indeed.

Starred review from March 1, 2015
Fabulist and avant-gardist Danielewski (House of Leaves, 2000, etc.) embarks upon a long-promised 27-volume fantasia with this sprawling, continent-hopping potpourri.On its face, this first installment is the story of a girl. And rain. And a "ridiculous dog bed." And a cat. And then the whole of human civilization and of the human propensity to do wrong while struggling to do right. The storyline is scarcely describable. Think of it this way: what if a prepubescent Leopold Bloom had fallen down a rabbit hole and wound up in Southeast Asia with a Pomona street gang in tow? Young Xanther, bespectacled, mouth full of metal braces, acne-spattered and left-handed, epileptic, self-doubting and sometimes self-hating, is a mess, just as every 12-year-old is a mess. She is also, her doctor assures her, something more: "If I could grant you one certainty, Xanther, one which you could hold on to without dissolving under all your scrutiny, let it just be how remarkable a young girl you are." So she is: there's scarcely a thing in this world she's not interested in and has theories about, spurred on by a brilliantly eccentric dad who's always talking about engines and the thought of Hermagoras of Temnos, "whoever he was, a rhetor, whatever a rhetor is." So what does she have to do with an Armenian cabbie, a pidgin-speaking Singaporean, and a Chicano street gang? Ah, that's the question, one that the reader will be asking hundreds of pages on, tantalized by the glimmerings of answers that peek through rainy calligrams and sentences endlessly nested like so much computer code. Danielewski's efforts at street-tough dialect verge into parody ("Like this be plastic shit. All scratched up and chipped"), but most everything about this vast, elusive, sometimes even illusory narrative shouts tour de force. Strangely, it works, though not without studied effort on the reader's part. And as for all the loose ends? No worries-there are 26 volumes to come in which to tie them up.

December 1, 2014

Danielewski, who got worldwide attention for House of Leaves and a National Book Award nomination for Only Revolution, offers the first of an ambitious multivolume project. The settings swing from Mexico to Southeast Asia to Venice (Italy and California), and key among the array of characters is 12-year-old Xanther, who sojourns forth with her dad to get a dog and ends up caring for a creature that's far more edgy and exotic.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 2015

This 800-page tome initially seems quite daunting, especially since it is only Part 1 of an ongoing story, but astonishingly it proves thoroughly readable. Danielewski (House of Leaves) employs multiple fonts and page layouts to differentiate and expose eight plot lines, all of which unfold on the same rainy day in May. The story of 12-year-old Xanther, her parents, and her precarious medical condition predominates in scope and sentiment, but the other narratives are equally intriguing and thematically distinct, including a story of gang life and an enigmatic sf thriller. The text is typographically inventive, with the standout aspect being how the dialog in Xanther's story is punctuated like computer code: {surprisingly} \ on a level beyond gimmick, evoking a complex and nuanced world of possibility with regard to punctuation. VERDICT This novel goes beyond the experimental into the visionary, creating a language and a style that expands the horizon of meaning. The strict encoding of words is married to the extensible coding of computer language to form a metalinguistic hybrid that hints at an evolved form of literature. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]--Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos Lib., CA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2015

This 800-page tome initially seems quite daunting, especially since it is only Part 1 of an ongoing story, but astonishingly it proves thoroughly readable. Danielewski (House of Leaves) employs multiple fonts and page layouts to differentiate and expose eight plot lines, all of which unfold on the same rainy day in May. The story of 12-year-old Xanther, her parents, and her precarious medical condition predominates in scope and sentiment, but the other narratives are equally intriguing and thematically distinct, including a story of gang life and an enigmatic sf thriller. The text is typographically inventive, with the standout aspect being how the dialog in Xanther's story is punctuated like computer code: {surprisingly} \ on a level beyond gimmick, evoking a complex and nuanced world of possibility with regard to punctuation. VERDICT This novel goes beyond the experimental into the visionary, creating a language and a style that expands the horizon of meaning. The strict encoding of words is married to the extensible coding of computer language to form a metalinguistic hybrid that hints at an evolved form of literature. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]--Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos Lib., CA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.