On "There Is No Year" by Blake Butler ***

This innovative novel is not easily summarized, as unlike most works of fiction--indeed, unlike many works of nonfiction--there is no concrete narrative, no problem that needs to be resolved, no thrust toward climax and resolution. What there are are motifs and words and images, some of them amazing, a joy to read. In fact, it is this, Butler's constant play with language that drove me to read another of his books, despite my only halfway satisfaction. (That I was satisfied only halfway but read all four hundred pages of text in less than a week says something about how engaging the work is, despite my not being able to put a finger on exactly what happened or what the book even is.)

Motifs are a strong part of the book: family, homes, bugs (most especially ants), death, dreams, the letter O, boxes, light, circles, copies, disease--all these play a part. On the surface, the book is about a family--a father, mother, and son--living in a home. Early on, the family discovers a copy family within their own home. The copy home, discovered later by the dad, hints at one of the book's likely themes: the dark underside of all life--our inevitable deterioration and death. While the real home has two stories with stairs leading up to the second floor, the copy home has two stories with stairs leading down to the bottom. The copy home has no windows, just darkness.

At various points in the book, the family tries to sell the home. The son grows sick. The son befriends a girl at school and goes to her home. The dad goes to a job to stare all day at a computer, at the light in a computer, a job that each day grows farther and farther away, as if the boredom of driving can extend not just time but space. The son too stares into a computer, playing a game that has no point or ending--a figure simply walks across a room on a screen until being haphazardly destroyed, only to be resurrected and start again.

The father clears the family's mailbox of creepy crawlies, merely to find them return in greater numbers each time that he opens the slot. The son worries about ants eating his flesh.

Perhaps, if anything, the book's title hints at the overall trajectory of this work: this is a novel written outside of time. There can be no motivating plot that propels readers on because "there is no year." There is just one long dream that leads, inevitably, toward death or light or whatever one will have these things to be over and over.

On "Ricky's Index Fingers" by Blake Butler (586 words) ***

In Blake Butler's hands a coming-of-age story becomes a horror story, a stream-of-consciousness experiment, and a reason to obsess about the glories of language experimentation. Our character meets himself meets a photo meets a woman. Read the story here at Matchbook.

On "The Copy Family" by Blake Butler (2311 words) ****

Here is a story about not just one doppleganger but three. Beyond that, I'm not exactly sure what it's trying to say, but it sure is interesting. I'll take a stab at deeper ideas anyway: The tale starts with one family meeting its copy. Exact in each way, the "real" family pushes the copy family out of its home. Here we have a concern with authenticity. What makes something authentic? And how and why is the authentic preferred to the inauthentic, even when they are exact duplicates of one another? We don't like to consider ourselves just like others in society. We like to think ourselves unique, and so our actions dictate the killing off of our duplicates, setting ourselves off. Except . . . Sometimes duplicates are better--or just as good. Despite ourselves, we settle on our copies, just as our children often grab the lion's heart of love from their parents (spouse for spouse, person for self). Anyway, that's one reading. Maybe you can find another here at Fifty-two Stories. (Word is, Butler has a new novel coming out this spring--I look forward to it.)

On "Scorch Atlas" by Blake Butler ***

Butler is a poet of sorts. Each of these stories makes up part of what is a short story cycle or a novel in stories. But each also is a collection of images and lines that stand up on their own demand attention. Such makes for a very dense reading experience, requiring attention to every sentence. There is also the appreciation to be forged for the various word choices--the smell of the "sum" of a dump, for example ("Seabed"). This is what I like about the collection.

Two stories stood out for me. "Seabed" is about a survivor and a girl he picks up on his journey across a wasteland that used to be home. "Tour of the Drowned Neighborhood" is just that, and it's brilliant. It is easy to see in it a kind of homage New Orleans in Katrina. But it is not that. It is a tale of a town drowned in destruction and kept that way--from the point of view of one of the destroyed. It is a literal tour of the neighborhood under water.

The subject of these stories hints at the subject of the larger collection, which is exactly what the title of the book suggests--an atlas of a place after destruction. And in that was where the work grew tiresome to me. So much darkness and not much light until the expected end. As I did when I read another collection of stories set around the theme of death, I found myself growing weary. Were it not that Butler is such a strong writer on the sentence level I would have likely grown weary enough to put it down. Thankfully, Butler wows in each line, and that was enough to keep me reading.

One caveat: Featherproof Books has done a bang-up job on the design of this work. Each page, like each sentence, is a work of art. The design complements the book every bit.

On "Pretend I Am There" by Blake Butler (35 pages) ****

I don't know exactly who Butler is drawing from, but similarities to disparate sources seem numerous, all put here in one single work that is totally newfangled. There's dreamlike oddity. There's sadness. There's absurdity. I'm reminded of Tao Lin. I'm reminded of the movie About Schmidt. Our narrator adopts a dog, a sick one, and tries to get rid of it. Our narrator keeps up a one-sided dialogue with a random person on e-mail. Our narrator sits, terrified of the plane he's riding in. Each section is short and to the point. Each section is beautiful in its own way. Did you know that today you are the oldest you have ever been? Of course, but I'd never really thought of it that way--until Butler's narrator brought it to my attention. Learn more obvious facts here at Publishing Genius.