EVER

by Blake Butler

Fiction. "Within the psychic architecture that is EVER, Blake Butler explores the way bodies swell and contract, going from skin to house and back again. And the way houses too shrink to fit us first like clothing and then like skin and then tighter still. The result is a strange, visionary ontological dismemberment that takes you well beyond what you'd ever expect"--Brian Evenson. "Blake Butler is a daring invigorator of the literary sentence, and the room-ridden narrator of his debut novella, EVER, nerves her way into a hallucinative ruckus of rousing originality"--Gary Lutz. "In EVER--as in, indicating any time in the past or future--light is entropic; 'the sky could lift your skin off'; domestic rituals are anamorphotic mind fucks granting 'no exit method'; and doors won't open even when you don't try..."--Miranda Mellis.

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Poetry, Science Fiction, Literature, Speculative Fiction, Novels

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 14, 2009

About the author

Blake Butler is the author of EVER, Scorch Atlas, and two books forthcoming in 2011 and 2012 from Harper Perennial. He edits 'the internet literature magazine blog of the future' HTML Giant. His other writing have appeared in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, Dzanc's Best of the Web 2009. He lives in Atlanta.

Reviews

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though it doesn’t exactly suit the book, I have to think about EVER in terms of plot, character, and (I know, I know) author biography. Talking about it any other way would require the use of color fields and degenerating tones, though, and that shit does not translate to the blogosphere.

Blake’s booknotes offer hints to EVER, which otherwise stands un-annotated as a series of rooms folding in on itself, a girl folding into rooms and finding rooms. Apparently he wrote it after the Atlanta tornado destroyed his house and he went to live at his parents’ house. He talks about the tornado here and it’s very clear the state he’s in that would give rise to a book like EVER. (I’m done talking about Blake like I am his biographer because he is my friend. The fucked claustrophobic nature [to borrow a phrase:] of this book would make me curious about the author’s state regardless.)

EVER is all full of brackets, which suggests the open/closed roomlike/womblike construction of the thing. I thought of it in terms of HTML but a normal parenthetical kind of thing would work I think. Here’s a little bit:

[I could see the door still a little.

[I could -- still could -- see the door.

[Door(s)(s).

[Def.: door (n): 1. a thing I'd noticed.

[2. A thing through once I'd --

[once I'd -- been. ]]]]]]]

The brackets are important to the book, which is all about open and closed spaces and yawning chasms and riddles. I’m picky about layout and typographic tricks in fiction; if you’re not writing what you’d call a hybrid, anything beyond the traditional or slightly modified words and punctuation of your language are all you get, unless you have a very good reason, such as expressing the idea that a girl thinks in terms of small spaces.

There’s one part where the narrator is licking the bathtub and she tastes a layer of herself and a layer of Comet and a layer of her mother. That pretty passage is the book distilled; layer upon unsettling layer, intriguing even as it attempts at times to repulse.

Incidentally, when I was showing the book to a grammarian friend of mine, he flipped it over and read the Gary Lutz blurb:

[B.B.:] is a daring invigorator of the literary sentence, and the room-ridden narrator of his debut novella, EVER, nerves her way into a hallucinative ruckus of rousing originality.

Grammarian friend scoffed and was all, “ridden has two definitions, Lutz” and then I looked it up and realized that Gary Lutz Was Right—a phrase I would wear on a t-shirt if the opportunity was presented.

The deal with this book is that it offers a puzzle like The Exquisite but instead of dissecting reality, it dissects surreality as it wobbles in a frame of reality, which essentially turns you on your ass and shoves a prism up there. Needless to say, I recommend reading EVER in the bathtub.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thematically connected episode in total suburban desolation to accompany most of Butler's oeuvre to date, but compartmentalized into an endless journey through a single house. Read it for its pure poetics of destruction uncanny psychological architectures.

[George]

Ever reads as though Blake Butler encountered Lutz, whose first story collection debuted in 1996, and decided to mimic the style in this 2009 effort. While the novella's not original in that sense, it is original when compared to the inept and uninspired rest of literature. Still more, Ever reads as if Lutz channelled a bit of JG Ballard and MZD's House of Leaves. The first half is stronger than the second, which is a bit peculiar for something as short as a novella, but overall this is yet another title from Calamari Archive that's worthy of your eyes. It also features some unique illustrations from CA head honcho Derek White.

[Jonfaith · Rating 2 out of 5]

My time with this was probably for the wrong reasons. Perhaps it would be more accurate to suggest it was inexact causes. I just learned a few hours ago about the memoir that Butler penned about his late ex wife. I wasn’t familiar at all with her but I had read Butler before and although wary felt compelled to proceed with this. As someone very accustomed house-based anxiety, I appreciated the viscous imagery afforded to structural creaking and the haunting banality of hearing drips in the night.

2.5 stars

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blake Butler brings off sentences that at once estrange & seduce, their phrasing & pacing like some 21st-Century resurrection of the Middle English, constructed w/ an ear to assonance & buried rhymes. From the second page of EVER: "In the light my skin was see-through -- my veins an atlas spanned in tissue." Not much later, more pugnaciously: "Streams of night might gleam like glass. The dirt would swim with foam." Appreciation of this small, scary miracle depends on appreciation of such beveled gems, the bits & pieces of which it's composed. Myself, I might as well've been knocked from my horse on the road to Damascus, & what floored me is also a miracle of compression. EVER contains only occasional full pages of prose, indeed it features a central sequence on which there are no more than a few lines per page, & it has interstititial designs to boot, faint gray hints of Gorey, breaking up the novella still further. Yet I find gleanings of story enough to sustain me. EVER tracks a soiled Alice (unnamed, actually) through the looking-glass & way beyond, drawn on by a force she can't understand, & that may eventually destroy her. But first she travels through room after room of a phantasmagoric home. Sample: "The next room was made of wobble. Magnetic tape streaming from the rafters, bifurcating blonde split-ends. Cashed." (& the rest of the page runs blank... inviting meditation, perhaps?) Strange as EVER's house-tour is, though, it nonetheless recalls a classic turn of the mind, the psychological phenomenon sometimes called "the dream of rooms." Such dreams can occur at any age, but they're most common near the end of life, as a person revisits all the arenas of experience. Garcia Marquez makes brilliant use of this phenomenon, for instance, when he anticipates the death of Jose Arcadio Buendia in 100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE. A more compatible figure for Butler's well-paced nightmare, however, would be Beckett's Malone, since if this girl too is dying, it's of some illness or wound she can never understand, in a place she can't say how she reached, & yet it's these very same gaps of self or soul that help her achieve a perverse assumption to heaven -- & the reader's along with her.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 or 5 stars? Not sure but this book is one of the strangest I've ever read, and needles and unsettles you... more later.
..I'm still not sure what to say about this book but I am carrying it around with me and sneaking little reads when I can (eg in the pub when Clare goes to the loo), and am puzzled but hooked. Jolted too, and feel a bit trapped by the prose in the same way the protagonist is trapped in her various rooms..

Soemthing apocalyptic has happened, everything burns and melts or disappears in ‘yawnings’:
the sky could lift your skin off. The air would shift like some fucked puzzle. Whole bird flocks… would disappear or become fire or melt away to sludge.

The writing is often this beautiful and scary. John's review - which led me to it - is good on the language and the book's literary antecedents, he cites Marquez, and especially Beckett's Malone Dies (from the trilogy). So if you're up for that strange mix you'll like it. I might have more to say but for now I'm going to go on dipping in...

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever seems like a sort of post-apocalyptic tale. Imagine if Cormac McCarthy's The Road was narrated by a female character who couldn't leave her house. It took me a bit to get used to Butler's gritty (and sometimes strained) abstractions but by the midway point of this novella it really takes off--thank goodness for the well-timed character development. I also liked that the prose is framed by hard brackets (not even given the softness of parentheses) throughout the book, further painting a picture of being trapped. This could be the quintessential book in the Calamari Press catalog.

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Call me Paul Atreides because I’m all about that Blake Butlerian Jihad.

[Sabra Embury · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me four sittings on a NY subway daily work commute to start and finish Blake Butler's "Ever." Twice was in the AM before coffee. The other twice was at night.

It engaged me as it would others whose fantasies are filled with melting solar floaty cars, evil cyborg love-bots, and paranoia--in the mess of all the questions in it, and its rich ambiguous superfunk hell-ride.

If there exists a dark part trying to hide in the depths of the reader of "Ever," the dark part will come out to roll around in scabs and bile and grow an extra two-inches just to get a new mark on the hall notch wall.

A fan of Hemingway's prose, or the minimalistic ebb and flow of it, will crave an attempt to blow perfect cigar smoke rings, while looking through vintage Hustler magazines in a bubble bath--a foamy and squishy bubble bath of squidmeat entrails and cellulite, even though they're not really, and never have been, a smoker.

If the daydreaming mind makes habits of playing in a rooms with soft fuzzy orange and white kittens dragging colored yarns across expensive Oriental rugs, "Ever," will transmogrify kittens into an L train coming by with a huge straight-edged razor attached to the front of it, slicing commuter's heads and shoulders off in a huge blood shower party, while he/she squats on the ground with an umbrella, smiling.

"Ever" exercised my creative mojo by giving it a month long trial gym membership with turbo treadmills facing 80" inch plasma TVs and a free bottle of fake tan deluxe.

[Jasmine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book I would say is the precursor to there is no year, I think it's a good book to read as an introduction to blake because it's a shorter version of the much longer book. I like it, it's a little more complicated and confusing (I'd say there is no year was making pretensions to the mainstream harpercollins did publish it after all)

highly recommended

[Eugene · Rating 4 out of 5]

like johannes görannson’s DEAR RA, blake butler’s eerie EVER’s a howl — a generational cri de coeur, but instead of the anthemic us-ness there’s left now only solitary i’s peeping sometimes wildly sometimes mutely about. and replacing the ruined reputed best minds of the last boom are self-alienated observers of the intractable and indomitable structures, which serve only to reinforce their own alienation.

[At first our local leaders tried to zone around the madness, to block off damaged sects with panes of glass, but the error swung so often, the glass just magnified the problem — the shatter echoed in the ground (p 8).

i thought of renee gladman's [book:JUICE|353405] a lot while reading EVER. if the content and concerns are quite different nonetheless the prose in both can be seen as lines of poetry laid end to end, where the all important function of the line break has now been transferred to the puckering pocket between sentences. EVER even has a fairly palpable scansion — more often than not bricks of anapests and iambs are mortared together with commas or prepositions. but it is never predictable, and its stunningly-sculpted sentences shimmer and gloat like the surfaces of donald judd shapes in geometric progression.

its gore and nightmare may be reminiscent of creepier lynchian jump cuts but the deadened sadness of its voice suggests something perhaps more dedicated to hopelessness. definingly unredeemed, EVER’s punked emily dickinson updates are fun for the hole family.

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

here's what I learned illustrating/publishing the book (includes book trailer):
http://5cense.com/ever_swag.htm

[mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the book is its attempt to carve an idiom out of the language for the narrator’s voice; an idiom composed of reworked syntax, dominant with consonant, onomatopoeic diction. In the narrator’s voice, this idiom comes alive in the way the words seem rightly awkward, stumbling against one another, a voice struggling with an unmastered language that as text becomes language masterfully expressed. The text is aware of itself as a text, and there are a couple awkward moments of overt reflexivity, but the reflexivity is primarily sublimated in the strange idiom given to the narrator, which is the real achievement of this novella.

Ever tells the story of an unnamed woman in a questionably empty house abiding the apocalyptic events that have come to her region. The house and the narrator have been (so far) spared from the phenomenal yawnings and foldings and crackings that are otherwise swallowing houses and daycare centers and disappearing people and turning the neighborhood into a sunless fungal wasteland. Her respite might have something to do with her mother’s interventions (and here we hear the punked rhythm of the voice):

"Mother swore among her final claps of cleaner English how our home had been protected. That through her green knees and praising pages, the shrines she’d installed in every bedroom, the blood breakfast, the grief she’d spilled into my father, the black nettle switch my legs had took the brunt of…"

But the narrator is alone now, and while inside the house, she navigates the ever-changing configuration of rooms peering out windows at the ongoing disaster, finding reminders of her past hanging on the walls or hidden in the moldy crust that’s overcome the house. She begins to listen to her own voice played back on a failing cassette player. But the house continues to deform and press upon her.

Ever recounts the narrator’s doomed days in her dilapidating house, but it is also the tale of a voice succumbing to the disaster of language, the tale of a voice overcome by the texts and voices that seek to infest it. The house itself is a text: “I pulled the knob with both arms buzzing…turning the page in a massive book.” And the narrator struggles against the impending disaster in various ways including prayer and repetition, which in the earlier pages of the text posits some measure of self (albeit failed and failing) against the text of the house:

"I hadn’t meant to speak in repetition; and yet did so out of something in me wanting. By the fifth instance the words slurred slightly, skewed from my original intention – and yet I did not pause or cause correction. I spoke into the room and felt it fill."

But the house has an opposing intention. While taking a bath, the narrator floats a book which soon sponges and pulps with water till “…it swelled also in me, cloned in my colon, head, intestines – the text on the battered pages made so large now swimming in me…” (Also here in the bath scene is a good example of where the elaborate book design by Derek White of Calamari Press fuses into the text, becoming and not overtaking.)

And as the textual threat continues to overwhelm here, she tries to shout out her the infestation: "I’d gotten crud all on my skirt – black thick motor crud clogged in my fingers, hair. I felt it want to flex around me. It slithered up my thigh. Only by rolling in the light and holding my eyes shut and fists clasped and shouting out every word I thought I knew, I kept the crud and what it wanted out of my inside..."

She cannot escape the text, anymore than she can escape the rooms in which she is paradoxically trapped (NB: these lines indent progressively but can't do that in these comments):

I crossed the room halfway again.
I crossed the room halfway again.
I crossed the room halfway again.

And as she sits like Krapp listening to the sound of her own voice from an earlier time, we begin to hear with her the familiar sentences that let her know the house is a text from which it is impossible to escape.

Note on layout: The bracketed text suggests recursive structure and the text recurs in form and content, although any structure imposed by the brackets is hard to follow from page to page. I came to think of the brackets as an object-oriented argument gone completely awry, the deranged computations of a rogue engineer, which overall befits and compliments the narrative. However, looking at it closely from page to page the indentions do show a formal organization, but it’s really not possible to follow it while reading.

Looking forward now to Blake’s Scorch Atlas, coming out in a few months, I think, where I anticipate he’ll grab at some new idiomatic ground.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read most of Blake Butler’s EVER during a long wait at a dentist’s office. Blake Butler and a building full of brutish torture devices go well together in some strange way. The disconcertion of empty, repetitious conversations swirling around me; the greenishly tinted television looping infomercial-like gleaming vapidity for veneers or something of the like; the hyper awareness to everything, including occasional peeks and glances by strangers at the pages as I read, themselves filled with strange, bracketed sentences and wildly undone artwork. All seemed like fragments born of the same crackling chaos.

“[ From the light I touched the light. I knew the light grew mold inside me. ]”

I don’t recommend long waits at the dentist's office, but I can suggest that lovers of superb small and artful books, as well as fans of Butler’s other works, give EVER a shot. Calamari Press does beautiful and dirty things to books at a far more reasonable price and with less blood than a dentist visit.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite line: [One book opened me instead.:]

This book is hard to explain. As the brackets so prevalent in the text suggest, there many levels upon which to interpret it. Is the house literal, the character agoraphobic, and the lack of a world outside of it suggests something post-apocalyptic? Or is the house a metaphor for any number of other things: the house as body, with many layers and complexities inside it? The house as boundary between reality and the metaphysical, suggesting an apocalypse of the psyche? Or the house as a blueprint of memory and personal history to be explored? It is deeply in touch with the visceral, but also the sensual and the spacial. An interesting and perplexing read.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ever is a bit hard to pin a label on regarding genre; novella?, prose poem sequence?, flash fiction cycle?... But that very elusiveness reflects a pushing outward of the boundaries of what the most innovative writers are currently doing with language in the service of artistic expression. As with Gary Lutz, Butler's fiction absorbs our attention by continually amazing us with the way it beautifully dances close to the edge of incoherence without falling in. There's excitement and wonder in that balancing act when it's managed with the linguistic skill and subtle precision of a writer like Butler. Highly recommended.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read EVER, technically twice in two days. The first reading was while under the strangling and dancing influence of pain medication. Each passed moment the drugs nudged me to remind me to sleep, but EVER said no, it demanded to be finished.

EVER is a terror dome that can't be escaped. The words shrink, swell, fight, and grow on each page. Doors are open, doors are closed, and minds get fucked. A fear of cocker spaniels is brought into light as well.

[Lee Rourke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Currently re-reading this Beckettian exploration of voice, space and light.

It's a truly wonderful, brave novella.

[୨୧ A Literate Taxidermy ୨୧ · Rating 3 out of 5]

i want what the writer is smoking

✢✥✢✥3 crud and children swallowing slush stars ✢✥✢✥

the only review i trust in the goodreadian wastelands:

really liked the book, it's my kinda weird. and it reminded of me something that escapes me, i don't know it "felt" familiar even though it my first book by butler, i guess this book felt like when you're alone as a child waiting for your family to wake up so you start day dreaming nonsense, crud.

anyway i personally would read the book again, to catch on the details from a new perspective.

i could see this book as an intimate live memoir of a woman in the apocalypse, i need to reflect on this book more that's all i'm gonna say for now.

[Scott_McClanahan41 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most book things now (with a few exceptions) are just built around nice, safe books written for nice and safe book club readers. These are usually the books you see on display at Barnes and Noble. These internet writers are, like, literally terrorists to me. They’re training as we speak. They’re getting ready to invade. They’re building an army.
(Scott Mcclanahan)

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is pure viscera. You feel it and make sense of it in your gut and bone marrow. It's pain and loss and suffering, the death of two parents turned into art. Disgusting and beautiful and almost completely insane.

[Alexandre Alphonse · Rating 5 out of 5]

It inspired me to write a novella.

[Seren B · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the way Blake Butler writes, I feel the sensations crawling into my body, almost as potent as I felt his later works. I find I am worried about going to the house I grew up in.

[Ani Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

To try to review this book and explain it away would be gauche. Instead I offer the uninitiated a primer. Ways you, too, can enjoy the free toy inside EVER (whether or not such ways were the intention of the author):

Like an unfolding narrative mystery that sees you chasing behind a slippery golden thread which you sometimes catch (but not unlike love, you are ultimately happier during the chase)

Like a lovely mouthful of language to savour until ill, then savour again on its way back, and maybe again later during an inopportune belch

Like a bouquet of metaphors waiting to be unfolded and assigned meaning (even, dare I say, relevant life meaning, for those of you who dig that sort of thing)

Like a design student or enthusiast, relishing the clever use of illustration, punctuation, fonts, margins, white space, and other concrete things - unless you are slightly OCD, since attempting to confirm whether every open bracket is neatly closed will give you the shakes

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read a little of this guy's stuff before and thought, cool, it's messed up, he knows what he's doing, he knows how to subvert plot points to eventually develop something that is more interesting -- he sees beyond the story to the Beyond in the story -- but this book, this book EVER, in EVER -- I don't know if it's the length or if he just tilted the plank farther, because this book is beyond even meaning, everything is questioned, no story no story but so many fascinating elements of story, post apocalypse domesticity I think, deluded interiority, Cartesian collapse -- and the thing is, whatever, who cares, maybe I just want the tumorous dog or the fake Chris Farley or the copy family, but in EVER, it's really easy to care, right, because of what, like the urgency of voice or the precision of language or

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

/In one room, two...//floral stain shifts, blue feeling ooze bladder, arms, felted gloss in gluey lips smatter.// between rocky windows slid in parallel shiftless rows, secret compartments where fetid flesh, harnessed in grey dittle dattle, arose me wakened, slight in febril mind smears/// caustic canary, veiled, lateral damaged, eye grease, fecal knowing ushered between steal, razor-walled nowheres.////

This is pretty much what this whole book felt like to me. I appreciate the positive reviews on here, and find merit in them, but in the end I got very little from this but grotesque, nightmare imagery and a sense that a book of this sort falls between poetry I don't like and novels that are too abstracted to offer more than a fleeting sense of disorientation and a vague sense the writer is trying to break through a writerly veil that leads to nowhere. not my scene.

[A Literate Doofus · Rating 3 out of 5]

i want what the writer is smoking

✢✥✢✥3 crud and children swallowing slush stars ✢✥✢✥

the only review i trust in the goodreadian wastelands:

really liked the book, it's my kinda weird. and it reminded of me something that escapes me, i don't know it "felt" familiar even though it my first book by butler, i guess this book felt like when you're alone as a child waiting for your family to wake up so you start day dreaming nonsense, crud.

anyway i personally would read the book again, to catch on the details from a new perspective.

i could see this book as an intimate live memoir of a woman in the apocalypse, i need to reflect on this book more that's all i'm gonna say for now.

[Jonny Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

read this at the vancouver airport while listening to cluster on a cheap mp3 player and waiting for a connecting flight. surprisingly accesible language for an experimental, anti-narrative novel(la) with no other characters other than the female(?) narrator moving through different rooms of a house that slowly consumes-engulfs-integrates her within it's structure. a mind-fuck, yes, full of creeping dark and white-stabbing light, but well worth the effort. purposeful madness. sentences that sizzle, shimmer and sing.

[Downward · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is like a friend recounting a very lucid dream or hallucination, complete with the nested asides that tend to dominate the story rather than distract from it. plot-wise I'm not terribly sure what's going on at any given moment: there is a girl, and she is moving through the rooms of a house that is haunted by decay. She describes inngreat detail all she sees with her own peculiar and idiomatic manner. large chunks of this book should be read out loud, as the sounds and rythmn is worth the price of admission alone. ok. thats all.

[David Kuhnlein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scrying into the cover I think of the words forever and evermore and when those four titular letters splay their fingers I can even see an elevator there. The narrator flexes her way through memories of the house she grew up in, feels the confines of the space, becomes the boundaries, the bathtub, the water in the tub, and leaks from room to impossible room. “Overhead the night had opened and all throughout it I saw words.” This novella is a biblical but abbreviated Butler.

(full review in Beyond the Last Estate)