Audacious, rambling….this author revels in bridging genre and high-gloss literature. Its a super-tome coming in at 1032 pages, which i have difficulty lifting. He blends police procedural, the horror of Stephen King and the density of David.F. Wallace. Its the apex of peak fiction, and mash-up of famous, forgotten and half-forgotten volumes, a library of an author’s mind.
Some readers may find TOM’S CROSSING ponderous and bloated, with too many twists and turns. I for one, love the author’s affection for his characters, the narrative requires patience and fortitude….so settle in. This is a book like no other, like a mountain, mazed up with crevices and canyons that make the journey easy to lose yourself on the way to the top. The work has new mythologies at its heart. Danielewski, shapes it all, the myths and new worlds. Its a tome of a book, arduous and impossibly thick in character and locations. One thing that it does, it takes you up to where it intended.
With its narrow setting, compressed chronological plot, and overload of minute detail, the novel is microscopically referential and slow in pace, even though the action of the book occurs over only five days, but we have over 1000 pages to flesh out plot and chapter. The author is wagering on his ability to harness the readers attention and hold them within a work that can demand a week, or weeks. Its Danielewski’s eighth novel, its set in Utah in 1982, in Orvop.
The protagonists are teens who run away into the mountains with two stolen horses in order to save them being rendered. TOM’S CROSSING has an autobiographical feel, is subtitled “A Western” with a narrative that’s slow in pace, smallish in font, compressed spacing, and narrow margins. The novel displays an igneous density and consistency. A big departure from HOUSE of LEAVES, where empty pages filled-in depth, or lack of it.
Speculation is common within TOM’S CROSSING. Peripheral characters often pop-up to speculate about plot details and characters intentions. It is likely that Danielewski has written the novel in the vain of a “book as a movie”, like an old expensive big-screen horse opera.Maybe the minutae of the novel’s information-about mountains, horses, guns, cars, songs, clothes, and a hundred other subjects-were intended in a long-running Sunday serial. The author incorporates ghosts, the teen girl, Landry has a dead older brother, Tom, a talking shade who accompanies Landry and her friend Kalin throughout their getaway. Tom is joined-after a descent-into-Hades episode- by a Native American ghost, a woman who leaped from a mountain to avoid being raped by Mormon settlers. TOM’S CROSSING is a ghost story but remains a slowly developing ghost story.
The novel’s villain, a sometime Mormon, idolises the violence of the original settlers who massacred Native Americans. A crooked resort developer, a clever performer, a consummate liar and a man without empathy, persuades, or forces, his sons to service his cruelty. By the end of the novel, all the characters including most of the speculators , are dead.. Danielewski occasionally peeps through and creates a minor character to express an author’s literary sophistication. TOM’S CROSSING is plot driven forcing readers to ride out the narrative all the way along its suspenseful journey. His scrupulous detailing of hour-by-hour action and the preciseness of his sentences, meant the author took a big risk on his backward-looking book.
The innocents, Landry and the bullied Kalin are interesting characters because Landry is an adopted Samoan with dark skin in white Utah. Kalin’s father is in prison, his mother is a churchless nomad, and he has no friends at school. Despite their youth, Landry and Kalin display talents for riding and shooting. The innocents are chased by the owner of “the worthless” horses, Orwin Porch, and his seven sons, who are seeking revenge for the death of the eighth son, an accident that Porch tries to pin on Kalin. The mothers of the teens get some chapters to put up female and feminist opposition to the Porche’s toxic masculinity. The women also argue about the value of Mormon culture.
The temporary shift away from the book’s Clip-Clop plot at pages 900 gives the speculators the foreground discussing visual art interpretation of the 80s and visual artists who have been horses. So ultimately TOM’S CROSSING is nostalgic and sentimental, a massive historical fantasy of wishful thinking with the two innocents, and their horses, triumphing incredibly over forces of practicality and profit.
The last sentence of TOM’S CROSSING is “Enuf is Enuf”.
