TOM’S CROSSING, by Mark Z. Danielewski
Sing, goddess, of Mark Z. Danielewski’s reimagining of the American western: His audacious, rambling novel “Tom’s Crossing” sifts gold from a slurry of genre conventions — Stetsons, palominos, Smith & Wesson rifles — marrying Homeric hymns with more recent accounts of land grabs and oligarchs. Set in Utah in 1982 and rendered in a tangy vernacular, this 1,200-page brick follows a pair of truculent ponies and the teenagers determined to save them from an abattoir — a simple plot that opens onto a metaphysical odyssey, an epic about epics.
It strikes out from a historical footnote: When Ronald Reagan was campaigning for president in 1980, he declared solidarity with the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, ranchers, entrepreneurs and courtier politicians eager to ransack millions of public acres in Western states for personal gain. In the novel, the wealthy Gatestone and Porch families of Orvop (an anagram for Provo) have been locked in a decades-long Montague-Capulet feud, which has only intensified with these disputes over federal land.
Enter 15-year-old Kalin March, the new kid in town, a wispy transplant from back east. His preternatural gift with horses impresses even the jocks who haze him. His single mom, Allison, juggles three jobs, and Kalin wears the same weathered Top-Siders to school each day. He’s a loner until he befriends Tom Gatestone, a jokey, popular junior whose mouthy younger sister, Landry, can wrangle a bronco with the best of the guys. (Landry, who dominates entire sections, bears more than a passing resemblance to Mattie Ross in “True Grit.”)
It’s no spoiler to reveal that Tom dies of cancer early in the story but returns as a ghost seen and heard only by Kalin. In his final stage of illness, Tom had extracted a whispered promise from Kalin: He must rescue two ponies from the paddocks of the Porch family butcher shop, and set them free far up in the Isatch mountain range.
Inevitably Kalin gets caught in the animosity between the Gatestones and the coarser Porches, whose patriarch, Old Porch, bullies his sons as they tend to his suspicious activities. A 59-year-old fireplug (and Danielewski’s iteration of Cormac McCarthy’s Judge), Old Porch sports a horsehair leather vest and mud-crusted snakeskin boots, “a testament to the endurin fortitude of the originless, of those always out beyond, little more than gristle, bone and sinew, with muscles lean and tight as high-tension wires.”
Kalin steals the ponies, Navidad and Mouse, and heads for Isatch Canyon, encountering the ghost of Tom on a spectral mount while Old Porch dispatches his boy Russel to reclaim the animals. Tom’s a bit dazed, stuck in his own Bardo, but still focused on his compact with Kalin. Together they ascend into the world of Katanogos, one of the Isatch mountains, joined by Landry and pursued by an adrenaline-fueled Russel. The first of many grisly deaths follows.
The cast expands rapidly: We meet an intrepid park ranger, a curious Mormon named Riddle, a passel of government schemers and the formidable Gatestone matriarch. Yet Danielewski keeps his reins slack. He knows when to walk and when to canter. Gone are the gimmicky inks and typographical swirls of his previous books; his brawny sentences carry us forward in a mature style.
As Kalin and Mouse scramble up a dangerous scree, Danielewski’s prose mimics the action with impeccable comma placement: “The ground held just long enuf, almost as if Mouse had commanded it to hold and the mountain had obeyed, the quarter horse’s mighty back legs compressin again and this time flingin them well beyond that inconstant menace of unsettled rocks, even beyond the ledge itself, at last onto hard and constant earth that at once granted them pace, rhythm, breath, and, at the top, finally, rest.”
The heavily armed Porch clan attempts to frame Kalin for murder as the teenagers push through Katanogos’s fissures and meadows. The chase is on, unfolding across hundreds of pages and purple mountain majesties, chilled by biblical storms and myopic greed. The land and sky quicken, a twist of the supernatural; the living and the dead mingle.
This author has always reveled in bridging genre and high-gloss literature; here he blends police procedural, the horror of Stephen King and the postmodern density of David Foster Wallace. It’s Danielewski’s infinite West, his stab at a canonical novel. Blink and you’ll miss references to a “Great White Whale,” the Trojan river Scamander as a verb and Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance. (In his youth Danielewski assisted on a documentary about the French philosopher.)
Musings on violence and mortality — what awaits on the other side of the “disappearin act” — imbue each chapter. Danielewski regales us with encyclopedic knowledge, esoteric puzzles and wordplay, as much for his pleasure as ours. The real-life Wasatch Range in Utah escapes the past tense, for example, by becoming the Isatch mountains.
This is peak maximalist fiction: a 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 forks in the trail. I advise patience and fortitude: Danielewski’s affection for his characters leads the big ideas much as Tom guides Kalin and Landry higher into the mountains. The narrative beckons us to settle in. Its excesses drive its risks.
The novel is also funny, à la Charles Portis, sprinkling droll comedy among its gorgeous surfaces. There’s plenty of riding detail as well, from saddles to lariats to the human-horse bond. The author (mostly) sustains his quick pace, despite the book’s length. Beneath the bulk lurks another mythic tale: Danielewski’s “House of Leaves,” the 2000 debut that launched a thousand Reddits. In the Times, Michiko Kakutani praised that novel’s originality while wryly noting that its “flaws are ones of ambition, not omission.” I could argue the same about “Tom’s Crossing,” but the voice is more attuned to its design and desires.
In the background, a sizable Greek chorus, including Kalin’s classmates, parades across the stage, singing strophe and antistrophe, recasting and perhaps distorting the events of 1982. Theirs is a collective oral history: “Samuel Zyer, perishin from late-onset cystic fibrosis, would go so far as to describe the relationship between Tom and the horses,” we learn, “as quantum chromodynamics in equine form.” Make of it what you will.
Literature is a collaborative art, rooted in song, embroidered with each retelling, born anew. It can steer our gaze toward the biosphere’s needs, lest the biosphere fight back. Danielewski’s love of life in all its guises brightens his novel; he hoists us onto the saddle to see it up close. “As the old saw goes,” he writes: “The world is best viewed through the ears of a horse.”
TOM’S CROSSING | By Mark Z. Danielewski | Pantheon | 1,228 pp. | $40
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