Review by Jacob Bender, reposted from Ships of Hagoth
Back in 2019, I presented a paper before the Association of Mormon Letters at the UC-Berkeley Institute of Religion on the widely-popular postmodern novelist Mark Z. Danielewski. I opened by noting that his deceptively austere book-flap bio at the time read simply, “Mark Z. Danielewski was born in New York City and lives in Los Angeles.” Yet as befits an author who plays with emptiness both metaphysically and literally on the page, I argued, the immense geography left unmentioned between these two coastal Metropoles could prove to be the most crucial of all towards understanding his immense literary labyrinths.
Specifically, left unsaid in this brief bio was the fact that Danielewski, born in 1966, spent his teenage years in Provo, Utah, where his father, Polish-born filmmaker Tad Danielewski, was a Professor of Theatre and Film Studies at BYU from 1975-1989. That is, though the Danielewskis were certainly not LDS themselves (they were at least culturally Polish-Catholic), Danielewski himself still came of age in Mormonism’s intellectual epicenter.
The remainder of my paper went on to argue that the influence of Danielewski’s Provo adolescence could be traced in the subtle Temple imagery and resurrection motifs scattered throughout his then-most-recent novel series The Familiar, in the twin Nauvoo allusions in his 2006 National Book Award finalist Only Revolutions, and in the nested-narrative structure (so similar to the multiple levels of mediation in The Book of Mormon) of his 2000 national best-seller House of Leaves.
My paper was politely received, though not much more than that. I tried submitting it to Dialogue (where I had published a couple times before), but the gist of the peer-reviews was that they found my readings to be a bit of a stretch. I finally just threw in the towel, posted it here instead, and got on with my life. They were likely right, I figured, my readings were probably a stretch anyways.
But then what does this man do! He goes and publishes Tom’s Crossing, a 2025 Western that takes place entirely in the Utah Valley in 1982! Seriously, its set in the city of “Orvop” (anagram for Provo), which neighbors “Rome” (Orem), in the shadow of Mt. Katanogos (Timpanagos) in the Isatch (Wasatch) mountains, home to church-owned Isatch University (the “I” instead of the “Y”), and features a Senator Hayes (clearly Orrin Hatch—though there’s also two prominent characters named Orrin and Hatch, just to confuse things further). The text also makes occasional reference to 1 & 3 Nevi, the Liminites, Briggham Young with the extra g, and Josephs Mith (Joseph’s myth, I see what he did there). All of this is clearly meant to indicate we are in a Utah from an alternate universe, one just slightly off from our own.
But then other parts of the Beehive state he plays completely straight: Utah’s name itself remains unchanged, as does Salt Lake City, Squaw Peak, Timpview, “This is the place,” and Governor Matheson. Then there are the local details he gets just right: the casual mention of Bishops and Stake Presidents and Relief Societies; the casseroles and baked-goods delivered to those in need; the fundamental niceness of the people there that is both a liability and a strength, that is sometimes a mask for their viciousness but other times genuinely kind; and especially how no one ever uses a swear-word stronger than “goshdarn,” not even in the heat of a gun-fight–which is played not for laughs, but only local color. I dare say the narrative entire is written with clear warts-and-all affection for the people of Utah Valley, a phase in his life he once hid but now fully embraces. Indeed, the real kicker for me is that his austere little author’s bio now reads, “Mark Z. Danielewski was born in New York City, raised in Utah, and now lives in Los Angeles.”
That conniving scoundrel! I don’t know whether to kiss him on the lips for finally validating me, or punch him in the face for playing so coy about it all this time! It’s like he read my obscure unpublished paper from years ago and wrote a 1,200-page novel in response!
Seriously, this novel is a door-stopper. I suspect he got gun-shy after the planned 27-volumes of The Familiar got cancelled after only Book Five, so this time he made sure to cram every last one of his ideas into only one fat tome. (Those reviewers who have complained about the novel’s excessive length would do well to remember that this is an example of restraint on Danielewski’s part.) But then, the narrative really does need all that room to breath and stretch; the mountains he describes merit nothing less. In fact, this might be the finest description of the Wasatch Front I’ve ever read. I sometimes wonder if LDS writers take those mountains so much for granted that we forget to describe them at all in our literature. It’s frankly wild to me that for all of the stories and novels and poems and hymns written by LDS members about the “Everlasting Hills” and “For the Strength of the Hills,” it took a non-member born in New York City to finally do those mountains justice. (In this, Tom’s Crossing is a spiritual successor of sorts to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire.)
Which leads me to address what is, for an LDS audience, the elephant in the room: it’s overall treatment of Mormonism. I can indeed confirm that this is emphatically a Utah novel, not a Mormon one. Yes, the two terms overlap and are inextricably entwined, but Tom’s Crossing is ultimately about Utah, not Mormonism; it is those mountains that fascinate Danielewksi, not the religion. In fact the word “Mormon”–including “The Book of Mormon”–appears nowhere in this otherwise hyper-detailed text. It is no more an anti-Mormon hatchet job than it is an apologia. The faith really is just local coloring here–similar to, say, encountering Irish-Catholicism in a novel set in Boston, or Hassidic Judaism in one set in Brooklyn, or Baptists in a story set in the Deep South. If you’re hankering for a take-down of the state’s dominant faith, go visit Reddit or whatever, because you’ll have to wade through literally a thousand pages of Tom’s Crossing to finally find your first serious critique of the Church (and really it’s just a critique of organized religion generally), one that is moreover only couched in a friendly conversation between two mothers worried sick about their son and daughter trapped up in the mountains, and which is but a small tangent to the main plot. Danielewski overall treats Mormonism the same way he treats the mountains, as simply another geographic feature of the state of Utah, something too big to be comprehended all at once.
As for the main plot! Although it is (comparatively) more grounded in reality than his previous novels, Tom’s Crossing still follows Danielewski’s tendency to explore how from small things are great things brought to pass: House of Leaves, recall, opens with a mere quarter-inch discrepancy between the inside and outside of a residential home (mimicked on the book cover itself) before it expands into impossibly massive labyrinths that violate all known laws of physics; The Familiar, too, was initially marketed as “the story of a girl who finds a kitten”, before similarly blooming out into a multi-volume series that encompasses not only the planet entire but the extreme limits of time and space.
Tom’s Crossing, in turn, opens with a quiet, unassuming teenager named Kalin one Halloween weekend in 1982 (the same year Danielewski turned 16), as he tries to liberate a pair of horses that he and his dead-best-friend Tom used to ride together before they are sent off to the butcher’s shop—yet this modest little quest somehow sets off a series of dominoes that culminates in a frame-up for murder, a mountain-wide manhunt, an absolutely massive landslide, legions of ghostly apparitions, and a Homeric massacre high up in the mountains. (Seriously, the novel is constantly lamp-shading its parallels to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; chapter 11 basically recreates the descent into the Underworld from Odyssey Book 11; and the massacre itself is a re-enactment of Iliad Book 21 and Odyssey Book 22. Like that Ur-Modernist novel Ulysses, Homer is at the heart of Tom’s Crossing.) There are hiss-worthy villains, heroic horse-riding, a budding teenage romance, a family feud, a Native American curse, and a wild winter-storm; the book also contains little easter-eggs for House of Leaves, including a literal Ash Tree in the landslide, and a book burned to provide light in the darkness.
Tom’s Crossing is also similar to House of Leaves in how it features endless analysis of the narrative from a wide-variety of commentators. Danielewski can’t help but beat you to the punch in interpreting his own books. Yet whereas the vast majority of the fictional commentators in House of Leaves are academics publishing in peer-reviewed journals and monographs, Tom’s Crossings‘ commentators by contrast tend to all be ordinary working- and middle-class folk speaking off-the-cuff years after the fact (often shortly before passing away themselves). Instead of journal articles and monographs, they make paintings and Country songs about the massacre. Even the lawyers and academics who get cited here are only ever quoted in casual conversations–over lunch or out for a walk or while sitting in a plane just before it crashes–never at conferences or symposia. Overall, Tom’s Crossing presents itself as a folk-tale, part of the local lore in Utah, fodder for endless gossip for decades to come—not an art-film ripe for academic analysis. It is an interesting twist on Danielewski’s old M.O.
Yet here too is a major distinction from House of Leaves: in his debut novel, Danielewski presents the house on Ash Tree Lane as fundamentally unknowable, as actively resisting representation, a sign without a referent. The resolution to its mystery is not only withheld but literally impossible; he constantly parodies the poverty of academic analysis. Indeed, all throughout House of Leaves—in its extended intellectual discussion of a non-existent horror film as viewed by a blind man and edited by a failed tattoo apprentice suffering a nervous breakdown—Danielewski constantly foregrounds the epistemological inaccessibility of its central narrative, as well as of all narratives everywhere. Not just the house, but everything is fundamentally unknowable in this novel. (In my old AML paper, I even speculated that his first novel was maybe intended to be “a subtle rejoinder against the self-assurance of LDS testimony-bearing”.)
But in Tom’s Crossing by contrast, the narrator bends over backwards to over-explain how every single detail of the narrative had been proven, investigated, and confirmed, over and over again! Seriously, the last 100 pages of this already-massive novel is the longest epilogue I’ve read since the end of the similarly-massive War and Peace (and Tolstoy’s novel only got that long from covering a seven year span, not five days); Danielewski in his epilogue basically retells the entire preceding thousand-page narrative as a police procedural, establishing how every single detail was later revealed to the broader public. Also like the epilogue to War and Peace, it is entirely skippable and excisable, since it belabors the exact same points the entire novel has already made. For reals, the only revelation in the epilogue worthy of your time is that the narrator has already been dead for four years (which explains how the narrator was able to listen in on so many casual conversations from ordinary people about the massacre shortly before they passed away themselves). Up till then, the novel had done an excellent job of slow-burning the tension and endlessly raising the stakes up to an immensely satisfying climax–it absolutely earns its rave pull-quote from Stephen King–but the epilogue I give you full permission to skip.
However, that still leaves unanswered why Danielewski not only included such a laboriously long and repetitive epilogue, but why he felt such a deep need to swing in the exact opposite direction of House of Leaves in the first place, to make the story sound as real and plausible as possible–this, despite renaming Provo “Orvop.” It can’t just be chalked up to writerly self-indulgence, I don’t think; if his goal here was to finally quit postmodernism and write a more marketable novel in a more commercial genre, the epilogue seriously undercuts that project. Indeed, I kept wondering all throughout my reading if he really was still trying to write another postmodern novel here–which also had me worried for a stretch.
For reals, Danielewski’s postmodern reputation caused me to spend so much of the novel constantly anxious that he was about to pull a Cormac-McCarthy-No-Country-For-Old-Men on me, that he’d finish with an intentionally-frustrating anti-climax wherein the bad guys get away with it after all or something; ironically, actually getting the straight-ahead, crowd-pleasing, wild-west-style shootout that the narrator had explicitly and repeatedly promised me for over 900 pages was the one thing I had not emotionally prepared myself for! (Homer’s Odyssey pulls the same trick, incidentally.) Even as I got exasperated by the long epilogue, I low-key kept dreading the fake-out ending I was sure was still coming–like in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or Ian McEwan’s Atonement or Ambrose Bierce’s Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge–where it would all be revealed as a fevered fantasy or hallucination. But no, at the risk of spoilers, Danielewski for perhaps the first time in his career tells a single story completely straight, without a hint of irony or obfuscation. This really is just a Western–far closer in style, content, and even pacing to Lonesome Dove than to Gravity’s Rainbow–not a postmodern deconstruction of the same.
But again, why all the over-explaining then? For now, the best I can speculate is that if House of Leaves was perhaps intended as “a subtle rejoinder against the self-assurance of LDS testimony-bearing” (and that’s a mighty big “if,” admittedly), Tom’s Crossing is perhaps a bit of an olive branch to his youth, a reconciliation with his teenage years, as he seeks to speak the same language as the Mormons he grew up around, by bearing testimony the same way they did that these things are true.
Does that mean he’s still subtly ribbing on the Mormons of his youth, by confidently affirming fiction as fact? Is this all still satire and parody of epistemological self-assurance? Is all this over-explaining just another species of “Methinks the lady doth protest too much”, purposefully trying so hard to convince you its real that it ends up not sounding real at all? Perhaps, perhaps.
And yet, and yet. I can’t help but continue to read Tom’s Crossing as an expression of good-natured affection for the Utah Valley and its people; partly that is because on the very last page, in the note “From the Transcriber,” Danielewski affirms that the entire preceding 1,200+ page narrative really “is but a dream lifted up amidst very real mountains that will stand there tomorrow and the tomorrow after that, no matter what they’re called or what’s said about them. There’s no Pillars Meadow either. Tom’s Crossing, though, is real. Ask anyone who’s been there. They’ll tell you a story.” It is Marianne Moore’s “imaginary ponds with real toads in them” in maximalist novel form, the fiction that tells the truth. Fiction is truth for Danielewski. As the narrator also preaches late in the novel, “Without fictions, we could know no tomorrow. More significantly, crucially even, without fictions, we would have no Heart” (1050). If Danielewski ultimately remains skeptical of the claims of organized religion, he nevertheless remains a true believer in the great importance of fiction itself, for helping us imagine a more compassionate future.
I also still read the novel as sincerely affectionate to the Utah Valley because Tom’s Crossing is ultimately about something very near and dear to the hearts of all LDS Church members: the redemption of the dead. The title of the novel, you see, comes from the fact that Kalin is accompanied in his quest by the ghost of Tom Gatestone, his good-humored friend dead of cancer, the same one who made him make a solemn oath on his death-bed to liberate those horses. In fact, the reason why Kalin keeps persevering against increasingly impossible odds, is because it eventually turns out that not only Tom, but the innumerable hosts of the dead beside him stretching back countless generations, will not be able to cross over into the next life in peace until those horses cross over into the wilderness as well. Like Christ, Kalin is willing to risk his life and suffer immeasurably to save his friends and accomplish the redemption of the dead. Like House of Leaves, the novel is a ghost story that ultimately turns out to be a love story.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I haven’t been to the Temple in awhile; I have small children and live a long drive from one nowadays, but that’s no excuse. Ironically, it took reading this sprawling novel by a non-LDS ex-Utahan to remind me to keep on doing work for the dead myself. As Tom’s Crossing also preaches, the way we treat the dead is inevitably the same way we treat the living.