The Familiar, Volume 2

August 15, 2015
A young girl quests for a cat. And no, it's not Alice in Wonderland. What is Danielewski's (The Fifty Year Sword, 2012, etc.) latest about? Might as well ask what the Coriolis effect is about: the world spins, and air blows, and that's the way it is, much as this oversized, overstuffed book spins and-well, furthers the story begun last spring with One Rainy Day in May. Pre-adolescent Xanther is brainy, confused, and petulant: "Mom, like I hate the supermarket?" "You do?" "Oh, uhm, I love hanging around stuff I can't have?" Xanther, whose favorite typographic symbol is an often sarcastic but sometimes genuinely puzzled question mark, is also cat-crazy, and ailurophiliac moments abound. Cats and their kin are just some of the animals that pass through these pages. So do many human types, from LA gangsters to Asian yuppies to Turkish cops to homegrown geeks. Miley Cyrus, too, one of many figures and tropes from pop culture to turn up. Match a herky-jerky narrative and multiple protagonists with nested-parenthetical stream-of-consciousness to do Joyce proud, and you're in tall postmodern cotton, and with literary and subliterary allusions to match, tucked away among the tangled storylines: "A single piece of paper inside, with a fiery orange paperclip holding nothing together, makes it clear Warlock is no Connelly or Nesbo." All fine and well, though there's some iffy syntax ("Xanther's scream calls to life the house") and some odd attempts at Chinglish and other dialects ("at entrance jingjing see he the damn pah chiao one"). But no worries, if you can make out clauses such as this: "sleeps the little one [like a little cloud {a blind little lamb>>}]." Readers with an interest in the latest in literary experimentalism will thrill at Danielewski's approach and clamor for the 25 volumes planned to follow in the Familiar series. Others, not so much.

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Starred review from September 15, 2015

Danielewski deepens the interconnected plotlines he introduced in the first volume of this work, One Rainy Day in May, and continues the creative use of typographical format. The innovative employment of whimsical //punctuation (((is used))) to great effect, drawing on the frontier between computer code and {[written language]}. Words and phrases in other languages and scripts, including Spanish, Mandarin, and Arabic, add to the overall effect. Volume 2 further develops the general paranormal spookiness alluded to in Volume 1. Xanther, the epileptic ten-year-old, remains central and the perspectives of her stepfather, a 54-year-old software developer, and her mother, a doctoral student in psychology, loom large. Other subplots--of cruel Mexican drug lords, L.A. street thugs, and "c," the Orb that sees the future--leaven the domestic drama. Oddly enough, it all seems to be converging around a cat: the familiar? VERDICT This novel reads like a graphic novel with very few pictures, though the images are critical. The wide array of plotlines create disparate parts that are slowly converging, encoded as a codex, the decoding of which--what we loosely call reading--renders an open-ended experience. Highly recommended for the intrepid reader.--Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos Lib., CA

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