Enuf Is Enuf

Tom LeClair clop-clops through Mark Z. Danielewski’s new novel “Tom’s Crossing.”

By Tom LeClairOctober 28, 2025

• Fiction

• SF

IN THE BEGINNING of Big Fiction, there were encyclopedic novels and mega-novels and then maximal novels. With Mark Z. Danielewski’s newest, the 1,232-page Tom’s Crossing, we have the supermax, a term most commonly used to describe huge prisons with no escape, no variety of existence, and few relations with the outside world. Prison critics call supermax facilities, with their frequent solitary confinement, excessively inhumane. Like the long novels of the 1970s and 1980s that I wrote about in my 1989 book The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction, Danielewski’s supermax is excessive but very different from those earlier works. The excesses of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), J R (1975), The Public Burning (1977), and the four others I discussed were generally caused by a hypertrophy of some innovative literary technique, such as Brechtian alienation effects in the epic theater of Gravity’s Rainbow. Rather than innovative, the excess of Tom’s Crossing is retrograde, a hypertrophy of specificity in traditional narrative and realist style.

Since I wrote The Art of Excess, I’ve been on the lookout for other Big Fictions. In 2010, I published an essay on what I called “prodigious fiction,” novels written by the next generation of maximalists: William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991), and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996). All three novels were about prodigies, and all were prodigious in intellectual scale. One could see the cybernetic influence of Thomas Pynchon in each, but they weren’t excessive, not the way Tom’s Crossing is. Neither were Danielewski’s previous long works, House of Leaves (2000) and the five volumes of The Familiar (2015–17), which reveled in multiplicity—in plots, characters, forms, styles, visual layouts. Tom’s Crossing is much longer than any of the earlier novels I’ve mentioned but is, at the same time, reductive in its overelaborations of the conventional.

Unlike the world-building and information-gathering characteristic of two generations of maximalist novels, Tom’s Crossing is locale-remembering and storytelling. With its narrow setting, compressed chronological plot, and overload of minute detail, the novel is like a supermax prison where one must serve a long sentence with little variety and very limited contact with the world outside the walls of the story. In this era of reduced attention spans, when readers of literary fiction are tempted to stray to other forms of entertainment, Danielewski wagers on his ability to bring readers into and hold them within a work that will demand weeks, probably, of attention. In his 2017 book The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention, David Letzler claims that a mega-novel’s meandering excess of detail—what he calls “cruft,” a programming term—is valuable because it trains the reader’s attention to separate the significant from the insignificant. This is not the case with Tom’s Crossing, for it appears to ask readers for the same word-to-word, page-to-page attention that they would give a late novel by Henry James. Otherwise, readers would risk missing, for example, the one sentence midway through that indirectly identifies the mysterious putative author and narrator of the book. The supermax imposes the law—of diminishing returns.

I’m sure Danielewski knew the risks of creating this anachronistic supermax, and I think he may have had interesting reasons for choosing to do so, for departing so radically from the postmodern experimentalism of House of Leaves and The Familiar, his now-paused series of 27 volumes. Perhaps Tom’s Crossing could risk being a supermax because House of Leaves attracted and kept a cult following of mostly young readers. When Danielewski visited my university, I saw them form the longest book signing line I’d ever witnessed. Throughout his career, Danielewski has, with a very active internet presence, encouraged his fans’ questions, speculations, and loyalty. He may have concluded that they would be willing to serve a supermax sentence imposed by their magus. I mention the cultists here because, when writing about a new Danielewski work, one can’t put out of mind the fanatical close attention his followers will give the work—and this review.

Depending on how one counts, Tom’s Crossing is Danielewski’s eighth novel, yet much of it seems like a first novel by someone else, some extremely ambitious naïf like the Thomas Wolfe of Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life (1929), a prolific writer obsessed with the details of his hometown and coming-of-age story. Tom’s Crossing is set in Utah in 1982, when Danielewski was 16 and living in Provo, which is called Orvop in the novel. His Orvop protagonists are teens, a boy and girl who run away into the mountains with two stolen horses in order to save them from being rendered, an idealistic act with a very long tail of tragic consequences. I don’t mean to suggest that Tom’s Crossing is autobiographical, just that it has qualities one might find in an autobiographical first novel by someone who had not read Danielewski, or the other postmodernists.

Subtitled “A Western,” Tom’s Crossing makes Cormac McCarthy’s trotting horseback stories seem to gallop. Because Danielewski’s sentences are microscopically referential, his narrative is relentlessly slow in pace. Although the action of the book occurs over only five days, Danielewski takes over 1,000 pages to tell the story. And those pages are not like the many almost-blank ones that hurry along House of Leaves. Tom’s Crossing has a smallish font, compressed spacing, and narrow margins. An imitation and celebration of mountainous immensity, the novel displays an igneous density and consistency, a major departure from Danielewski’s play with empty page space in his earlier works.

Unless Tom’s Crossing is his earliest work. In the first few pages of his 2015 novel The Familiar, one can find passages that show up, much revised, in Tom’s Crossing. Could they have been, back then, outtakes from a tyro’s old unpublished manuscript, or were they jottings for a backward-looking future novel? I’ve listened to several of Danielewski’s rather self-indulgent talks on YouTube about the many drafts of Tom’s Crossing, but his also-listening followers may still speculate about the “true” origin of the novel.

Speculation is common within Tom’s Crossing. Very peripheral characters who have little or no direct knowledge of the novel’s events often pop up—some as late as 2053 in this historical work from the future—to speculate about plot details and characters’ intentions. Before saying any more about the protagonists and plot, I want to offer my own speculations about Danielewski’s possible models and motives for creating this supermax because I fear that, without some inviting framing of these 1,232 pages, most readers who are not his loyal fans will be scared off. If they do “Clop-Clop-clip-Clop” (a recurring equestrian phrase in the novel, suggesting slowness) along to page 900, those fans will be happy to find Danielewski temporarily crossing back from the supermax format to the metafiction and autocriticism of House of Leaves.

When Danielewski discussed a model of the proposed 27 volumes of The Familiar (only five of which were published), he mentioned long-form prestige television with its multiple plotlines and numerous characters. One model of Tom’s Crossing seems to be movies, old expansive big-screen horse operas. The minutiae of the novel’s information—about mountains, horses, guns, cars, songs, clothes, and a hundred other subjects—might be captured in a long-running Sunday serial. Instead of writing a screenplay, Danielewski has written what I would call the “book as movie”—torrents of words “recording” the particulars a movie could document in a second or two. The book as movie reverses the threatened rendering of the horses, their reduction to usable by-products, by rendering scene and action in high resolution. Danielewski’s form is congruent with the era he depicts, the period before The Wire (2002–08), what the narrator calls “slow time” when “the clearest view […] demands an awareness mindful of the slow but uninterruptible accretion of detail.”

Given the constant attention in Tom’s Crossing to natural settings and animals, especially the numerous named and individuated horses (and one mule), Danielewski’s retrograde accretive style may seek to remind readers of data-dense naturalistic novels such as Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899) or Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), both about, like Tom’s Crossing, murders. In those earlier books written by journalists, nature and culture, fate and morality, accident and intention, inheritance and autonomy were explicitly and continually discussed, as they are within the confines and terms of Tom’s Crossing (and as they probably would not be in an actual chase movie). The discourse within a book-as-movie should provide a supplement to screen-based surfaces. But the teens’ talk about nature is pedestrian and constrained by the verbal limitations of the supermax’s rather naive and lightly educated narrator.

The title page of Tom’s Crossing states that it’s by “E.L.M.” and is “transcribed” by an obscured name. Though third person, the narration sounds first person, but we don’t know who that admittedly “long-winded” person is until very late. The prose is highly oral, full of colloquialisms, stock phrases, clichés, solecisms, and digressions. Think a more sophisticated Huckleberry Finn with numerous references to Greek myth and literature that Danielewski uses to frame his postnaturalistic novel as a prenovelistic epic (readers of the Iliad will remember it was chock-full of specific information, some of it about horses).

In place of Homer’s gods, Danielewski 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. Ultimately, these characters are followed by a whole parade of ghosts, including those of animals. Noting the Greek references in Tom’s Crossing, readers will understand one ghostly analogue of the text they occupy, but they are not released from supermax discipline. Yes, Tom’s Crossing is a ghost story, but it remains an excessively specific and, therefore, a slowly developing ghost story.

Although narrated in the future about events that took place 40 years ago, could Tom’s Crossing stand for—be an indirect epic of—historical and even current-day America? Perhaps. Danielewski portrays the Mormon Church exerting conservative political power. The novel’s villain, a sometime Mormon, idolizes the violence of the original settlers who massacred Native Americans. A crooked resort developer, he is a clever performer, a consummate liar, and a man without empathy who persuades—or forces—his sons to serve his cruelty. If Tom’s Crossing was actually written in the 20th century, it could be a prescient epic. Or I could be looking for some way to connect this supermax to the world outside it.

Tom’s Crossing reaches even further back than Greek epic, aspiring to be a kind of Utah Book of the Dead. By the end of the novel, all the characters, including most of the speculators, are dead. The participant author/narrator has been dead for at least four years, speaking the book from some form of afterlife that includes the character’s horse. Perhaps, in this afterlife, time is not pressing for the narrator (as it may be for living readers), so the narrator can mosey along with that “uninterruptible accretion of detail.” When alive, the teens often discussed passing through several “gates” before arriving at the final gate (Tom’s crossing) where the horses would be returned to the wild. Many versions of the Egyptian Book of the Dead emphasize gateways in and through the underworld, and Tom and Landry’s last name is “Gatestone.” Once again, though, there is no gate out of Tom’s Crossing, no foreshadowing or spoiler that would relieve a reader’s need to finish the supermax narrative they are stuck within.

Danielewski occasionally peeps through his unliterary narrator and creates a minor character to express the author’s literary sophistication. A gallerist thinks of “Friedrich Schlegel’s dictum: Every work of art brings its own frame into existence. To which Wolfgang Kemp had later replied: The frame brings the work of art into existence.” The gallerist then notes that “he liked all sorts of frames.” Allusions and partial analogues—old movie, naturalistic novel, epic, ghost story, book of the dead—are ways for Danielewski to frame the supermax narrative, but the frames don’t change the overwhelming essence of Tom’s Crossing, its page-to-page-to-page overabundance of detail.

Danielewski has, from the beginning of his career, rigorously considered his readers and how his works would be read. When he visited a graduate class of mine discussing House of Leaves, he told students they could not articulate an interpretation he had not already considered. Perhaps he has thought of my following two speculations about his possible intentions and readers’ reception of his supermax novel, speculations generated by two recent essays about reading and publishing. The first is a New Yorker piece discussing writing that resists processing by AI. I can imagine the tech-savvy Danielewski designing Tom’s Crossing to be such a book, one created for only human readers. AI could presumably extract a plot outline from Tom’s Crossing, but what would it do with all those intrusive interpreters whose sincere remarks seem so obviously speculative to a human reader? Would AI realize it needed to speculate about the speculators? Although 1,232 pages may discourage many human readers, perhaps those retrograde pages are a heroic defense of reading itself, the history of human reading before AI. If so, Tom’s Crossing might be an original simulacrum of a 19th-century novel and an instructive work of contemporary fiction (though the pedagogy to make such a point seems extreme).

The second essay, in The Metropolitan Review, reports on how contemporary publishers make decisions about new fiction manuscripts, using algorithms and depending heavily on “comps”—books to which a new work could be compared in advertising: “If you liked X, read Y.” Although my advance reading copy of Tom’s Crossing included a whole page of marketing plans, no single comparative work was mentioned. I know of no comp for Tom’s Crossing. The closest contemporary American novel I can think of to represent pre-conglomerate publishing bravery and success is Lucy Ellmann’s 1,030-page Ducks, Newburyport (2019). It is very different, in its stream of consciousness style, from Tom’s Crossing but equally risky for the publisher because of its maximal recording of minutiae. Ducks, Newburyport, though, is not a supermax comp: it’s emphatically localized in Ohio, but the narration is all over the place. Ellmann gives the impression that readers could enter her fiction anywhere and could even choose to leave at any time without missing the essence of her narrator’s scattered psychological situation. Tom’s Crossing, by contrast, is plot-driven—and in a way author-driven—with readers forced by its narrative conventions to ride out the whole suspenseful journey. Tom’s Crossing is an anomaly, a non-comped work, and perhaps it’s a reaction to and rejection of comp-ruled corporate publishing just as the novel may be a possible counter to AI.

The risky trick for the artist of excess—whether the work is innovative or retrograde, whether the writer is doing stealth cultural commentary or telling a long story—is to expand the scale of synecdoche one might find in oral conversation or in a realistic novel such as The Great Gatsby (1925). The writer deforms a conventional fictive model with expansion and hypertrophy, and then demonstrates that the excess is not really excessive but functional—a perceptive and true representation of the world, or an efficient way of delivering the author’s perspective on it. It took decades for readers of Moby-Dick (1851) to recognize that Herman Melville had pulled off this trick. Even today, some readers consider Melville’s numerous pages of cetology excessive, unnecessary interruptions of the traditional pursuit plot—until readers realize (or are shown in a college classroom) that those cetology chapters make Moby-Dick a postmodern collage novel about epistemology, the many ways of knowing (and not knowing) anything. But Danielewski is no Melville. His scrupulous detailing of hour-to-hour action and the exactitude of his sentences do not open outward but close inward to form a monstrous version of the realistic novel. Danielewski and Pantheon took a Big Fiction risk on this backward-looking book. Anyone interested in maximalist novels will probably want to share the risk and enter the supermax of Tom’s Crossing.

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Now, the “however.”

This reader/reviewer/speculator found Danielewski’s allusions, genre framing, and possible interventions in publishing much more interesting (even if sometimes overdetermined) than his conventional chase plot with its many cliff-hangers, ledge-jumpers, and other literally narrow escapes in the mountains above Orvop—and more interesting than the spunky, opinionated Landry and the bullied, recessive Kalin. Both are stereotypical YA fiction outsiders: Landry because she is an adopted Samoan with dark skin in white Utah, Kalin because his father is in prison, his mother is a churchless nomad, and he has no friends at school. Despite—or because of—their youth, Landry and Kalin display magical athletic talents, particularly for riding and, with Kalin, for shooting.

These innocents are chased by the owner of the basically worthless horses, Orwin Porch, and his seven sons, who are seeking revenge for the death of the eighth son, an accident that Porch attempts to pin on Kalin. “Old Porch,” as he is known, would have been a good Iago, says one minor character. The Porches make Faulkner’s Snopes clan of horse stealers and barn burners seem genteel. The mothers of the teens get some chapters to put up a female and proto-feminist opposition to the Porches’ toxic masculinity. The women also argue about the values of Mormon culture.

Danielewski presumably shifts focus among the teens, the Porches, and the mothers for variety, but wherever his attention lands, there is somnolence-inducing repetition of quotidian behavior and predictable dialogue. With the teens, it’s feeding the horses, adjusting their saddles, speaking gently to them, and then it’s discussions of food, the weather, and danger. Because Landry can’t see or hear ghost Tom, conversations between him and Kalin have to be repeated for her. Repetitions were necessary for the forgetful listeners of oral epics, but they imperil a codex book—even if the repetitions of trivialities create the novel’s supermax excess, its “documentary” authority. Fortunately, the internal speculators—now perhaps like a Greek chorus—do offer some variety as they imagine possible motivations for, and implausible interpretations of, the main characters. Because many of the speculators live outside Utah and the United States, they intimate the global importance of the local story told in Tom’s Crossing. The speculators are also a tip of Danielewski’s cowboy hat to all his online followers who offer sometimes esoteric feedback on his fictions.

The temporary shift away from the book’s Clop-Clop plot at page 900 gives the speculators the foreground. In two gallery scenes that last 70 pages, Danielewski brings together descriptions of the speculators’ visual art interpretations of the 1982 story, along with references to actual literary and visual artists whose subject has been horses. The first exhibition, in 2020, displays the physical works, and the layout follows the narrative of the novel. The second exhibition, in 2031, shows the works more randomly on LED screens. If Tom’s Crossing was written before House of Leaves, the speculators’ interpretations of the story being told prefigure the more explicit and formally daring auto-interpretations in House of Leaves.

Thinking about the difference between the two exhibits, a gallerist offers, in the novel’s characteristic homespun style, a defense of the first—and of Danielewski’s traditional plot and hyperrealistic sentences in the initial 900 pages:

I’m old-fashioned, I guess. I still love the smell of paint on canvas. Cal Carneros was thinkin of those paintins in Chamber Five in the Time Gallery. Sure, maybe the colors had dimmed some and some of the artists’s names had fled from recollection, but there’d still been some dang fine pieces, fine enuf to remain dangerously volatile in his memory and imagination. He’d never forget the violence, the loss, the grandeur, the bloodshed, the absurdity, the stupidity, the unexpurgated repetitions of History.

After this gallery interlude of self-references and philosophical quotes from other artists, Danielewski returns to his “old-fashioned” specificity for some kung fu–like Western gunplay, its legal aftermath, and a long denouement, about which I will say nothing because readers will need strong curiosity about the characters’ fates to reach the end of Tom’s Crossing. For readers who get that far and still wonder about the initials of the putative author “E.L.M.,” the answer is buried back on page 518 in my ARC. My apologies to Danielewski’s followers for spoiling days and maybe weeks of detection and speculative pleasure.

¤

Near the end of Tom’s Crossing, minor characters more often represent the author than his speculating readers. One character says that “complex fictions […] will strengthen your mind, which will in turn help grow and mature your Heart.” Another minor character says that “elaborate fictions […] prepare the mind for elaborate realities.” I agree with both “authorial” assertions, but “elaborate” does not necessarily mean complex or profound, no matter how many historical analogues and wisdom nuggets an author assembles. Danielewski elaborates to excess his five-day plot, but the effect is more simplification than complexity. “THE CLOSER YOU GET THE LESS YOU SEE,” as John Barth puts it in his 1979 novel LETTERS. The frames referred to earlier are like brief visits from the external world to the supermax prison of historical narrative that has little to do with contemporary “elaborate realities.” Though told from the underworld, the novel lacks the competing voices one would expect to find there—perspectives that might give the novel the complexity of Don DeLillo’s maximal “underworld” of “elaborate realities.” The last sentence of Tom’s Crossing is “Enuf is enuf.” Or maybe too much.

About those “realities”: House of Leaves was, from the beginning, a horror novel with an invented horror, a house built over an endless abyss. The horror in Tom’s Crossing is, for many pages, as believable as religious atrocities or clan warfare or crazed revenge, but the presence of ghosts sets the horror at an emotional distance. The Familiar was also imbued with the paranormal. For all of Danielewski’s literary sophistication and genre play, I’ve come to believe his strongest appeal to his young readers is not his formal experimentation but the appeal of Harry Potteresque fantasy. The cult is drawn to the occult.

In 1981, a year before the setting of Tom’s Crossing, Morris Berman published The Reenchantment of the World, which called for the cultural dethroning of science, the suspension of disbelief, and the restoration of the wonder and mystery lost when the old gods departed. (I came across Berman’s book while writing about Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1985 novel Always Coming Home in The Art of Excess. When writing this review, I happened upon “The Trouble with Re-Enchantment,” Jason Crawford’s wonderfully thorough essay for LARB.) Danielewski attempts to reenchant a rural world—and a basically realistic (if melodramatic) novel—with some shopworn tropes: presenting mountains as the Romantic sublime, treating horses as characters with rich inner lives, giving his protagonists charmed lives, and suggesting we are surrounded by ghosts of the past, both recent and ancient. The novel also has the three-part structure of the heroic journey—departure, initiation, return—outlined by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), an outdated study of enchanted myths and stories. It’s not a magic mountain the teens traverse, but it does move—yes, move—to protect them on two occasions.

Danielewski appears to be earnest about animal rights and ecology, but I ultimately found Tom’s Crossing less enchanting than nostalgic and sentimental, a massive historical fantasy of wishful thinking, with two innocents (and their horses) triumphing incredibly over the forces of practicality and profit. The way to protect the natural world from ravenous, rendering humans is not to move backward toward animism and what used to be called “superstition” but forward to an understanding of just how “complex,” “elaborate,” and therefore fragile the planet is. For illustrative contrast, consider two recent lengthy novels by Richard Powers—The Overstory (2018) and Playground (2024)—in which adult characters, some of them scientists, experience the wonders of trees and seas without any of Danielewski’s mystifications. The secret lives of horses are not “enuf.”

I wrote positive reviews of House of Leaves and the first volume of The Familiar when they appeared. After the latter series was canceled in 2018, I hoped that Danielewski’s next book would be a comeback success. I won’t call Tom’s Crossing a failure, just not a major work of maximalist fiction. The novel seems to me a stupendous waste of effort similar to the excess of Hanya Yanagihara’s 800-page A Little Life (2015). I’d be a lot more enthusiastic about Tom’s Crossing had Danielewski written an authentic “throwbook”—a throwback to the science-influenced naturalistic novel, with no ghosts. It could still be a giant supermax, just one with more contemporary information. Pulling off such an antique feat at 1,232 pages? Now that would be epic, fantastic without fantasy.