On a certain meta level, it will be fascinating just to find out if he even finishes the series at all--if he dies first--or grows bored with it and wonders away--or if Random House loses patience and drops the whole project if sales aren't robust enough. These aren't cheap books, after all--the pages have a fine sheen and gloss to them, so as to accommodate the hi-def color images of spheres, abstractions, and the cosmos printed throughout. Danielewski likewise makes generous use of minimalist, empty space on many of these pages, such that there's almost a sense of outright decadence to how some of these expensive pages are seemingly wasted.
But there is one small element--idle speculation, really--that preoccupies me about The Familiar; namely that Mark Danielewski is the son of Polish avant-garde film-maker Tad Danielewski (which explains in part House of Leaves' infatuation with movies), who himself was a professor of cinema at Brigham Young University from 1975 to 1989--which is when Mark was a teenager and young adult. That is, Mark Danielewski's formative years were spent in Provo, Utah.
Now, neither Utah nor Mormonism receive any mention whatsoever, explicit or otherwise, in the works of Danielewski (this will not be a rehash of my post on the Implicit Mormonism of Arcade Fire, in other words); his bio's all cite New York as his birthplace and L.A. as his current home. BYU, Provo, the LDS Church, the whole shebang, leave no apparent mark on Danielewski's artistic development.
Or does it? I wonder out loud, because early in The Familiar, Vol. 1 we get a description of a distant, Mars-like planet--paradoxically neither real nor a dream--one utterly inhospitable to all possible life, yet one nevertheless that uncannily contains a "temple...strange yet intimately familiar" (and of course the limits of this blog's html script cannot hope to reproduce the literally-orb-like typography of this chapter). Needless to say, there are many Temples in the red, Martian-like deserts of Utah. Now, one obviously need not fly all the way to Utah to find Temples; Danielewski himself relies more on ancient Greek references, as he describes said Temple as "Similar perhaps to what remains now of the sanctuary of Athena Pronania at Delphi." An ancient Greek Temple on an abandoned planet is almost more a touchstone of old Star Trek reruns than anything Utahan specifically.
But then, the there are only two Cas chapters in the whole volume (I eagerly await volumes 2 and 3, to hopefully give 'em her due); most the chapters are dominated instead by L.A. gangbangers, cops, taxi-drivers, and video game designers--it is Danielewski's current California home, not the distant site of his awkward and likely-justifiably-forgotten High School years, that serve as the main setting for this novel. But there is a main character of sorts, in Xanther, a 12-year-old girl. Danielewski even cheekily describes the novel as simply the story of "a little girl who finds a kitten", though that of course does it no justice.
Especially given the manner in which she finds the kitten, which again circles me back to the fact that he was raised in Provo--for in the closest thing that this volume has to a climax, Xanther is riding with her adoptive father Anwar (surnamed Ibrahim, the Arabic word for "Abraham", into whose family, in LDS Theology, all converts to the Church must be adopted into), to pick her up a dog in the midst of a massive rain storm. But then, all of a sudden, Xanther jumps out of the car without warning, runs several blocks (leaving poor Anwar panic-stricken) through the nigh-Biblical flooding, all to find a tiny kitten mewing pathetically in a storm drain.
That's the uncanny thing, that even Anwar has difficulty wrapping his mind around--how on Earth, amidst that thunderous storm, did she hone in on a single kitten mewing for its pathetic little life literally blocks away? And did she revive the kitten, or did Anwar, or did she actually bring it back to life (which Father Abraham could not even do)? And did her parents relent and bring the kitten up stairs to sleep in her bed with her after all later that night, or did this kitten mystically reappear beside her of its own accord? Have we been witness to a resurrection? What strange supernatural divinity is contained in this contact between Xanther and the kitten?
Or, if this were some LDS Sunday School lesson, could we reframe the experience thusly: "a great and strong wind rent the mountain, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice" (1 Kings 19:11-12). Amongst all the tumult and natural catastrophe, divinity is made manifest not in the noise but in the still small voice.
Again, there is nothing unique to LDS theology about a quiet, divine voice piercing the noise--but LDS theology sure is comfortable, even at home, with the idea. As is The Familiar. And its author was raised in Provo by a BYU professor--even if his family shared zero of the faith of their neighbors, still they had contact with them.
I almost, kinda, want to meet Mark Z. Danielewski in person, and just ask him informally if those awkward teen years in Provo left any sort of lingering mark on him at all, or have any trace influence upon The Familiar as I'm reading it--but then again, Danielewski is notorious for giving contradictory answers in different interviews, shutting down all hope of getting a straight answer from the source. He could just laugh in my face and accuse me of the standard LDS fallacy of reading every favorite author as some sort of proto-Mormon incognito (as we do all too embarrassingly often with Wordsworth, Milton, and CS Lewis)--or he could enthusiastically confirm my reading, perhaps just to please me and amuse himself--and I would have no way of knowing if either or neither is the sincere answer.
Which may also perhaps be a reaction against his growing years in Provo--he could perhaps have found Mormons, we of the monthly testimony meetings that all begin with "I know...", to possess just a tad too much epistemological self-assurance for his taste. That experience could maybe have imbued him with a desire to undermine any sense of Cartesian certainty in his readers--hence, House of Leaves. As well as The Familiar, perhaps. As with all things Danielewski (or the Universe, for that matter), the only honest answer one can give is, "Who knows?"
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