This is such a rich, deep read. Some the phrasing rings so nicely: "What I realized, after The Familiar had ended, is that this sort of flat, bloodless, hardstop truth of things, this market reality, is the exact sort of tragedy that Mark Danielewski’s fiction salves." This is one I'm going to read several times. I remember reading The Familiar, volumes 1 through 4, and falling into their world, but not as deeply as I fell into House of Leaves. I wonder if there's something about when (in our lives) and where (in an author's canon of work) we first "meet" an author. The ground zero of our reading. I'd read House of Leaves first (and then a great short story of his in the now defunct Black Clock magazine) and nothing subsequent has quite resonated like those. But what if I'd read The Familiar first, and then found my way to House of Leaves? Can the heat generated by our first experience ever be matched?
I'm delighted that you liked it, and that some of the observations rang a personal bell for you.
And I think you're 100% on the mark with the when/where we read a certain book, and how it destines that book for a certain "rank" in our estimation. House of Leaves is certainly one of those books that -- while readers, in my experience, praise and enjoy it whenever they find it -- people tend to say that they didn't read it but "found it," or that it "found them," at just the right/necessary time.
You mention falling in love with The Familiar, vols.1-4; did Volume 5 not work as well for you? Had you fallen off the train at that point? (No judgement!)
Thank you for this. I'm loving your style—divergent, but returning again and again with a reverent respect to the author, their intentions, and the natures which ultimately drive the production of their work.
My favorite line: "At no point in our several hours of conversation do I feel he is unprepared to talk about aliens." Perfect.
I felt the loss that came with the cancellation of The Familiar all over again while reading this. Like so many cancelled shows, I still reserve a little hope for its return.
Same here -- and I'm glad you mentioned that! There was a long section of the essay that I ended up cutting where I speculated at how the series might come back. I got a galley for his new novel, TOM'S CROSSING, and there wasn't a great place to talk about it in this essay but TC is Danielewski's first "conventional" novel. There are typographical innovations here and there but for the most part it's a very dense block of plain text.
It's a big leap for him. He's unprotected by the devices, in his earlier books, that allowed him to just tell a critical reader, "You don't understand the book." This one's very easy to understand. So he's putting himself out there as just a storyteller, and I think he'll get some glowing feedback, which might embolden him to revisit THE FAMILIAR, let his defenses down more readily, and complete the story as (ideally) some chunky volumes of plain-text narrative.
Thanks! I did get a galley for Tom's Crossing, back in April-ish, and there were places here and there throughout the many drafts of this article where Tom's Crossing came up, but it ultimately seemed like a distraction from the material at hand. When the novel finally comes out, or shortly beforehand, I definitely plan on writing about how it speaks to the material in this essay, though, so I hope you'll be around for it!
Entertaining essay, but I have to say, the bits about the demise of Borders don't make much sense (their original sin was... negotiating favorable discounts on books?) or really ring true. It wasn't the iPod that killed Borders; it was the fact that they expanded recklessly in the 1990s and became dependent on constant growth, and outside money, to keep the lights on. Once Amazon started posing an extinction-level threat to physical bookstores in the 2000s, they had no cushion and, unlike Barnes & Noble, weren't able to hang around long enough for physical bookstores to regain a (smaller) niche with the book-buying public. It's a shame for those of us who remember the original Borders Books in Ann Arbor in the 1980s, which was basically the opposite of what the chain became after the Kmart acquisition.
I see what you're saying; the point of that passage (as I see it) was to illustrate that there's no single thing that ruined Borders, that it was more like a series of business choices that were not always *bad* choices, inherently, but happened to intersect with larger cultural factors.
The iPod decimated CD sales--OK, fine. It wouldn't have been much of a problem if the Kindle weren't simultaneously hitting their book sales; which in turn would not have been a huge deal if they hadn't outsourced their e-commerce to Amazon; which in turn wouldn't have been a big deal if they weren't alotting roughly 1/4 of floorspace and inventory to CDs...
It feels to me like a 60-page portrait of lots of different people doing their best and coming up short because they're standing at the intersection of larger factors--which, in a weird way, is what Danielewski was capturing kinda beautifully in *The Familiar*.
I envy you the opportunity to've browsed in one of those original Borders Books locations! Did those original locations at all resemble the "Superstore" versions that came later?
The original was nothing like the superstores. Imagine just a very large, well-stocked neighborhood bookstore, and that was it. It was a famously hard place to get a job (you had to take a seriously challenging English Lit exam, basically), and they prided themselves on being expert but stopping just short of snobby. Once Kmart bought them the entire original management team quit in short order. It’s a prime example of a business that could’ve lasted forever if they hadn’t grown.
That's fascinating. But I was surprised to learn that, before Kmart bought them, they had already expanded to 22 locations. So they were clearly *somewhat* growth-minded -- but it seems like it was just the right amount.
And yeah, what you're saying about the management team quitting in short order rings true with my research; I didn't look into what was happening on a store-by-store level, but it seems that the original owners jumped ship...not *entirely* because they were gonna ride their yachts into the sunset. I can't call up the phraseology but I remember reading something that suggested they weren't keen to witness what they'd done to their baby.
Kmart was headquartered in Troy, Michigan, not too far from Ann Arbor, and a lot of their executives were familiar with Borders and its local reputation as THE bookstore for book lovers. Their plan for the acquisition, though, wasn't "you've got a great business model, let's keep growing it," so much as "we want to go national with an upscale Waldenbooks, and your brand is the perfect fit." It's hard to overstate just how much the vibe changed after the acquisition, even when Borders was still in its mid-90s heyday.
I was surprised that they had 22 bookstores before the acquisition, too; I knew they'd opened a few satellite stores in the Detroit suburbs, but I didn't know it was that many. My only exposure was to the original Ann Arbor store, until I started encountering them in places like San Francisco and London in the late 90s and early 00s, when they were indistinguishable from Barnes & Noble.
My dad used to take me to the original Borders in Ann Arbor as a kid. If it’s possible, in 2025, to imagine a large store that’s a flagship for a chain but is somehow run by incorrigible, sometimes hostile snobs in the archetypal record shop mode, that was the vibe there in the first half of the Nineties. I was too young to understand it at the time, but I’m told they had a great selection, too, akin to a place like McNally Jackson today
That's unfortunate to hear, good grief (although I'd pay to see a sitcom in that setting).
My one experience of snobbery in a bookstore, I confess, involved my college self on the periphery -- but it was silent!
I sitting in a Borders, I was 21, and a staffer was shelving books a few paces over.
A teenager came over and said, "I'm looking for A Clockwork Orange."
The worker smiled and, just confirming, said, "Clockwork Orange. Anthony Burgess?"
The teenager tossed his bangs off his head (t'was the fashion) and said, "Yeah. It's supposed to be shelved in the Literal Fiction."
The staffer blinked. Looked over the kid's shoulder like she needed a flotation device. We locked eyes. I nodded. She blinked again. Said to the kid, "Let me show you where the literary fiction is."
Haha that’s honestly not so bad! To be clear, I was trying to describe the original Borders fondly. We could use more spaces like that for books, if you ask me
It was nice to see some attention given to Only Revolutions! I probably read it the wrong way out of laziness (all the way through one way and then flipped). It's one of the few books I would hesitate to recommend but that contained passages so good I copied them into my notebook. It's crazy to me how little the NBA nomination did to help sales. Though, looking at the extremely modest sales of Europe Central, which won, perhaps it's not such a surprise!
I love your take! I was reading Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" while putting the final touches on this Danielewski essay; I felt a whole vibration when she says, at the start, that the only way you can be well-equipped to analyze something is if you feel both affection and disdain for it. I feel that split toward Only Revolutions maybe more than any other book: there are parts that're inspired, and I wish I could share it with people, but they're just...kinda lost in the weeds of something too difficult.
“Daily Themes. Sort of an entry-level creative writing course in which students could write whatever they wanted.” No, no! Daily Themes enrollees have to respond each day to a particular themed prompt. The prompts build on each other over the course of each week. It’s a grueling class, not a free for all.
Hm, that’s interesting — I have an issue I needed to contact Dr. Moulthrop about in the meantime, so I’ll go ahead and ask him for details; this, over the phone, was his offhand memory of that 1986 semester. Maybe it was a strange time?
Although, to your point, I do keep learning new strategies and shortcomings with each profile and one thing I should have done, in this case, is cross-reference his description with some archival listing of what the class entailed. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
I'd be interested to know what you think, and what you my have learned, about the literary parallels, precedents, and models Danielewski may have had in mind for The Familiar. I take your point about the models he probably had in TV, but there would also have been models in previous multi-volume novels. Has he never spoken about those? Or is that an asked-and-answered subject among Danielewski readers? Was House of Leaves a farewell to literary precedents for him?
Unfortunately I didn't pursue much if the scholarship around The Familiar, but I know Danielewski has always been very tight lipped about the influences that run through it. I spoke with somebody who's reviewing the forthcoming novel, Tom's Crossing, who said there's lots of Homer, and some Egyptian Book of the Dead. I know Danielewski was deep into Eastern texts while working on TF, and quotes various koans in several of his publicity engagements for the 5 volumes as well as Little Blue Kite.
Thanks. If you find more, please post it. I'd make a distinction between sources used in the book (like the Book of the Dead), and literary models for the book (that would be Joyce, Pynchon, Gaddis...). Danielewski has long had a separate career from other literary and postmodern fiction, despite his many connections, so I'm always curious.
Fantastic piece for the dozens of us that read The Familiar series in its entirety and a fantastic piece for MZD fans in general. I jest on that first part, but the number of first season completionists is low, no doubt. The problem I've found is that I have no problem finding House of Leaves fans, but I'm not sure I've ever met a Familiar fan in the wild.
For whatever reason, The Familiar came to me at a time in my life when I had a little more time to devote to such literary excursions. As House of Leaves was a favorite book of mine, I decided to buy whatever Mark was selling, however insanely ambitious that just might be.
I read each volume twice while I waited for the next episode to drop. Some of the sections were definitely harder to grasp then others, particularly the ones written in Singlish, and I found that a re-read helped me understand everything a lot better.
Adding to this first season experience, I was even to attend a stop on the Familiar book tour and got my first volume signed. Regarding the tour, people were excited for more new work from Mark and there was a nice turnout. An older gentleman in the crowd expressed astonishment that this many people would come out to what was normally a live music venue to see a *writer*.
But the enthusiasm could only hold on so long for a project such as this. I know that in my own experience, this series felt all but impossible to recommend like you would a TV show. There could be no binge-watching equivalent of talking prospective readers into starting an 800 page novel with the caveat that it wasn't actually that long, but just seemed that way--some parts are written in code and other languages and weird formatting, really it goes by fast! A story that was most likely never going to conclude.
Thanks for the deep dive onto this topic and I also particularly enjoyed the millennial nostalgia of Borders
“Daily Themes. Sort of an entry-level creative writing course in which students could write whatever they wanted.” No, no! Daily Themes enrollees have to respond each day to a particular themed prompt. The prompts build on each other over the course of each week. It’s a grueling class, not a free for all.
This is such a rich, deep read. Some the phrasing rings so nicely: "What I realized, after The Familiar had ended, is that this sort of flat, bloodless, hardstop truth of things, this market reality, is the exact sort of tragedy that Mark Danielewski’s fiction salves." This is one I'm going to read several times. I remember reading The Familiar, volumes 1 through 4, and falling into their world, but not as deeply as I fell into House of Leaves. I wonder if there's something about when (in our lives) and where (in an author's canon of work) we first "meet" an author. The ground zero of our reading. I'd read House of Leaves first (and then a great short story of his in the now defunct Black Clock magazine) and nothing subsequent has quite resonated like those. But what if I'd read The Familiar first, and then found my way to House of Leaves? Can the heat generated by our first experience ever be matched?
I'm delighted that you liked it, and that some of the observations rang a personal bell for you.
And I think you're 100% on the mark with the when/where we read a certain book, and how it destines that book for a certain "rank" in our estimation. House of Leaves is certainly one of those books that -- while readers, in my experience, praise and enjoy it whenever they find it -- people tend to say that they didn't read it but "found it," or that it "found them," at just the right/necessary time.
You mention falling in love with The Familiar, vols.1-4; did Volume 5 not work as well for you? Had you fallen off the train at that point? (No judgement!)
A very relevant moment from Gaddis's sole televised interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4u6pKcObDY
Thank you for this. I'm loving your style—divergent, but returning again and again with a reverent respect to the author, their intentions, and the natures which ultimately drive the production of their work.
My favorite line: "At no point in our several hours of conversation do I feel he is unprepared to talk about aliens." Perfect.
I felt the loss that came with the cancellation of The Familiar all over again while reading this. Like so many cancelled shows, I still reserve a little hope for its return.
Same here -- and I'm glad you mentioned that! There was a long section of the essay that I ended up cutting where I speculated at how the series might come back. I got a galley for his new novel, TOM'S CROSSING, and there wasn't a great place to talk about it in this essay but TC is Danielewski's first "conventional" novel. There are typographical innovations here and there but for the most part it's a very dense block of plain text.
It's a big leap for him. He's unprotected by the devices, in his earlier books, that allowed him to just tell a critical reader, "You don't understand the book." This one's very easy to understand. So he's putting himself out there as just a storyteller, and I think he'll get some glowing feedback, which might embolden him to revisit THE FAMILIAR, let his defenses down more readily, and complete the story as (ideally) some chunky volumes of plain-text narrative.
I loved this but I was surprised not to get anything about the new book?
Thanks! I did get a galley for Tom's Crossing, back in April-ish, and there were places here and there throughout the many drafts of this article where Tom's Crossing came up, but it ultimately seemed like a distraction from the material at hand. When the novel finally comes out, or shortly beforehand, I definitely plan on writing about how it speaks to the material in this essay, though, so I hope you'll be around for it!
Entertaining essay, but I have to say, the bits about the demise of Borders don't make much sense (their original sin was... negotiating favorable discounts on books?) or really ring true. It wasn't the iPod that killed Borders; it was the fact that they expanded recklessly in the 1990s and became dependent on constant growth, and outside money, to keep the lights on. Once Amazon started posing an extinction-level threat to physical bookstores in the 2000s, they had no cushion and, unlike Barnes & Noble, weren't able to hang around long enough for physical bookstores to regain a (smaller) niche with the book-buying public. It's a shame for those of us who remember the original Borders Books in Ann Arbor in the 1980s, which was basically the opposite of what the chain became after the Kmart acquisition.
I see what you're saying; the point of that passage (as I see it) was to illustrate that there's no single thing that ruined Borders, that it was more like a series of business choices that were not always *bad* choices, inherently, but happened to intersect with larger cultural factors.
The iPod decimated CD sales--OK, fine. It wouldn't have been much of a problem if the Kindle weren't simultaneously hitting their book sales; which in turn would not have been a huge deal if they hadn't outsourced their e-commerce to Amazon; which in turn wouldn't have been a big deal if they weren't alotting roughly 1/4 of floorspace and inventory to CDs...
It feels to me like a 60-page portrait of lots of different people doing their best and coming up short because they're standing at the intersection of larger factors--which, in a weird way, is what Danielewski was capturing kinda beautifully in *The Familiar*.
I envy you the opportunity to've browsed in one of those original Borders Books locations! Did those original locations at all resemble the "Superstore" versions that came later?
The original was nothing like the superstores. Imagine just a very large, well-stocked neighborhood bookstore, and that was it. It was a famously hard place to get a job (you had to take a seriously challenging English Lit exam, basically), and they prided themselves on being expert but stopping just short of snobby. Once Kmart bought them the entire original management team quit in short order. It’s a prime example of a business that could’ve lasted forever if they hadn’t grown.
That's fascinating. But I was surprised to learn that, before Kmart bought them, they had already expanded to 22 locations. So they were clearly *somewhat* growth-minded -- but it seems like it was just the right amount.
And yeah, what you're saying about the management team quitting in short order rings true with my research; I didn't look into what was happening on a store-by-store level, but it seems that the original owners jumped ship...not *entirely* because they were gonna ride their yachts into the sunset. I can't call up the phraseology but I remember reading something that suggested they weren't keen to witness what they'd done to their baby.
Kmart was headquartered in Troy, Michigan, not too far from Ann Arbor, and a lot of their executives were familiar with Borders and its local reputation as THE bookstore for book lovers. Their plan for the acquisition, though, wasn't "you've got a great business model, let's keep growing it," so much as "we want to go national with an upscale Waldenbooks, and your brand is the perfect fit." It's hard to overstate just how much the vibe changed after the acquisition, even when Borders was still in its mid-90s heyday.
I was surprised that they had 22 bookstores before the acquisition, too; I knew they'd opened a few satellite stores in the Detroit suburbs, but I didn't know it was that many. My only exposure was to the original Ann Arbor store, until I started encountering them in places like San Francisco and London in the late 90s and early 00s, when they were indistinguishable from Barnes & Noble.
My dad used to take me to the original Borders in Ann Arbor as a kid. If it’s possible, in 2025, to imagine a large store that’s a flagship for a chain but is somehow run by incorrigible, sometimes hostile snobs in the archetypal record shop mode, that was the vibe there in the first half of the Nineties. I was too young to understand it at the time, but I’m told they had a great selection, too, akin to a place like McNally Jackson today
That's unfortunate to hear, good grief (although I'd pay to see a sitcom in that setting).
My one experience of snobbery in a bookstore, I confess, involved my college self on the periphery -- but it was silent!
I sitting in a Borders, I was 21, and a staffer was shelving books a few paces over.
A teenager came over and said, "I'm looking for A Clockwork Orange."
The worker smiled and, just confirming, said, "Clockwork Orange. Anthony Burgess?"
The teenager tossed his bangs off his head (t'was the fashion) and said, "Yeah. It's supposed to be shelved in the Literal Fiction."
The staffer blinked. Looked over the kid's shoulder like she needed a flotation device. We locked eyes. I nodded. She blinked again. Said to the kid, "Let me show you where the literary fiction is."
Haha that’s honestly not so bad! To be clear, I was trying to describe the original Borders fondly. We could use more spaces like that for books, if you ask me
It was nice to see some attention given to Only Revolutions! I probably read it the wrong way out of laziness (all the way through one way and then flipped). It's one of the few books I would hesitate to recommend but that contained passages so good I copied them into my notebook. It's crazy to me how little the NBA nomination did to help sales. Though, looking at the extremely modest sales of Europe Central, which won, perhaps it's not such a surprise!
I love your take! I was reading Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" while putting the final touches on this Danielewski essay; I felt a whole vibration when she says, at the start, that the only way you can be well-equipped to analyze something is if you feel both affection and disdain for it. I feel that split toward Only Revolutions maybe more than any other book: there are parts that're inspired, and I wish I could share it with people, but they're just...kinda lost in the weeds of something too difficult.
“Daily Themes. Sort of an entry-level creative writing course in which students could write whatever they wanted.” No, no! Daily Themes enrollees have to respond each day to a particular themed prompt. The prompts build on each other over the course of each week. It’s a grueling class, not a free for all.
Hm, that’s interesting — I have an issue I needed to contact Dr. Moulthrop about in the meantime, so I’ll go ahead and ask him for details; this, over the phone, was his offhand memory of that 1986 semester. Maybe it was a strange time?
Although, to your point, I do keep learning new strategies and shortcomings with each profile and one thing I should have done, in this case, is cross-reference his description with some archival listing of what the class entailed. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
I'd be interested to know what you think, and what you my have learned, about the literary parallels, precedents, and models Danielewski may have had in mind for The Familiar. I take your point about the models he probably had in TV, but there would also have been models in previous multi-volume novels. Has he never spoken about those? Or is that an asked-and-answered subject among Danielewski readers? Was House of Leaves a farewell to literary precedents for him?
Unfortunately I didn't pursue much if the scholarship around The Familiar, but I know Danielewski has always been very tight lipped about the influences that run through it. I spoke with somebody who's reviewing the forthcoming novel, Tom's Crossing, who said there's lots of Homer, and some Egyptian Book of the Dead. I know Danielewski was deep into Eastern texts while working on TF, and quotes various koans in several of his publicity engagements for the 5 volumes as well as Little Blue Kite.
Thanks. If you find more, please post it. I'd make a distinction between sources used in the book (like the Book of the Dead), and literary models for the book (that would be Joyce, Pynchon, Gaddis...). Danielewski has long had a separate career from other literary and postmodern fiction, despite his many connections, so I'm always curious.
Fantastic piece for the dozens of us that read The Familiar series in its entirety and a fantastic piece for MZD fans in general. I jest on that first part, but the number of first season completionists is low, no doubt. The problem I've found is that I have no problem finding House of Leaves fans, but I'm not sure I've ever met a Familiar fan in the wild.
For whatever reason, The Familiar came to me at a time in my life when I had a little more time to devote to such literary excursions. As House of Leaves was a favorite book of mine, I decided to buy whatever Mark was selling, however insanely ambitious that just might be.
I read each volume twice while I waited for the next episode to drop. Some of the sections were definitely harder to grasp then others, particularly the ones written in Singlish, and I found that a re-read helped me understand everything a lot better.
Adding to this first season experience, I was even to attend a stop on the Familiar book tour and got my first volume signed. Regarding the tour, people were excited for more new work from Mark and there was a nice turnout. An older gentleman in the crowd expressed astonishment that this many people would come out to what was normally a live music venue to see a *writer*.
But the enthusiasm could only hold on so long for a project such as this. I know that in my own experience, this series felt all but impossible to recommend like you would a TV show. There could be no binge-watching equivalent of talking prospective readers into starting an 800 page novel with the caveat that it wasn't actually that long, but just seemed that way--some parts are written in code and other languages and weird formatting, really it goes by fast! A story that was most likely never going to conclude.
Thanks for the deep dive onto this topic and I also particularly enjoyed the millennial nostalgia of Borders
“Daily Themes. Sort of an entry-level creative writing course in which students could write whatever they wanted.” No, no! Daily Themes enrollees have to respond each day to a particular themed prompt. The prompts build on each other over the course of each week. It’s a grueling class, not a free for all.