There Is No Year

by Blake Butler

Butler's inventive third book is dedicated "For no one" and begins with an eerie prologue about the saturation of the world with a damaging light. Suitably forewarned, the reader is introduced to an unexceptional no-name family. All should be idyllic in their newly purchased home, but they are shadowed by an unwelcome "copy family." In the face of the copy mother, the mother sees her heretofore unrealized deterioration. Things only get worse as the father forgets how to get home from work; the mother starts hiding in the closet, plagued by an omnipresent egg; while the son gets a female "special friend" and receives a mysterious package containing photos of dead celebrities. The territory of domestic disillusion and postmodern dystopia is familiar from other tales, but Butler's an endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer. This subversion extends to the book's design: very short titled chapters with an abundance of white space. Not so much a novel as a literary tapestry, the book's eight parts are separated by blank gray pages. To Butler (Scorch Atlas), everything in the world, even the physical world, is gray and ever-changing, and potentially menacing.

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Short Stories, Surreal, Novels

416 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2011

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

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unrealizing the American Family(/)Home.

The house the house the house house house househouseouseouhoushous oususehouse house and the family family f a m i l y

I don't know where to start so I won't. A selection of nonstarts.

-It seems like this might be some kind of literary sensation already. I don't really follow what things are actual literary sensations, but I get the impression that they're, uh, maybe Don Delillo and Gary Shteyngart or something. This is more exciting because it's coming up, totally unexpectedly out of diy/micropress weirdness that is usually super interesting but also super unnoticed. If people are suddenly taking notice of Blake Butler, maybe this indicates at least the opportunity for a shift in publishing attention towards a whole bunch of talented newer authors. What will happen? It interests.

-The danger of this book, on the other hand, is that it is almost too much. It is an explosion of insane sequences and insane details each of which makes an extreme impression on its own but become numbing when part of a 400 page flood. Almost numbing. The strength of this book is that it stays just this side of numbing, and the inundation ends up hitting, well, home. Deep into the idea of home. But in lesser hands it could of been a directionless spewed subconcious. Take care how you spew your subconcious. (why I am acting like I don't want more authors to spew their subconciouses? I LOVE subconcious spews. Maybe I'm worried that if this gets big, subconcious spew will get overly instyle and become devalued? I don't know what I am worried about, this is definitely too weird to be an actual trend-in-making.

-Is the book actually a spew of subconcious? Maybe, though it has extreme intimations of order. Some of these are: the way the shadings of the pages build up from varying greys towards climaxes(?) of bright white, the eerie displaced photos marking off sections(?), the fact that so much happens that it starts to seem like separate incidents are not really important in themselves BUT THEN are called up later after near-forgetting and they totally were important, the cohesion of language and imagery. There is probably a bunch of subconcious informing this, but that is true of most art I care about, and there a lot more going on, too. I think? I have further unraveling to do.

-I mentioned the page shading aleady, which is totally unique to this book as far as I know. There are enough other formal qualities to this work, that combined with the labyrinthine aspects of the house, and the horror-sensations, comparison with House of Leaves was inevitable. I think this is mostly incidental. House was about constructing a complex puzzle very very carefully, control and order, whereas There Is No Year is all entropy, rawer and looser and more visceral. I know I just said a bunch about the intimations of structure, but those have less to do with what it actually feels like to read a book in which everything, from the objects within, to the characters, to the idea of plot, is broken and breaking further.

-What is this book about? Deconstruction maybe. Or just decay. Aging and deterioration. Family, home, and shelter, definitely. Illness, perhaps. Or is about what it is about: a mother, a father, a son, ants and boxes and hallways.

-Any individual vignette is a pretty great stand-alone unsettlement. Read them aloud to friends. Savor the language. Savor the malaise.

-I liked this book.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

For all its disturbing imagery – a mailbox stuffed with an ever-replenishing supply of live caterpillars, closets full of hair, enigmatic black shape-shifting structures that swell to fill yards and subsume houses, repeated instances of mirrors reflecting mirrors causing psychic quagmires, swarming ants invading houses, etc. – I found this book very comforting, even soothing, and even now, a full week or so after finishing it, I look at it and get warm feelings. I typically don’t consider myself perverse – scratch that – what am I thinking? I often suspect I am the embodiment of the Imp of the Perverse, but still this warm feeling puzzles me…. I mean, this is essentially a book about a haunted house, but haunted in a way that sinks deeper than general horror fair, without deploying the typical horror tropes. It is a book about the failure of a suburban family unit, about pervasive illness, about profound emotional disconnect, about loss of identity, about nearly everything that is subtly or not so subtly noxious in cookie cutter contemporary life. It is not just the content that disturbs, but the writing style (a kind of free-floating nearly disembodied transcription of insomniac anxieties in a nearly monochromatic tone) as well as the design of the book itself (page color continuously progressing from white through shades of grey and back again, punctuated by dark nearly abstract photographs of interiors and views from windows), the varying shades mirroring one's consciousness as it's caught up in reveries shifting from wakefulness to semi-sleep to dream and round and round again. It all adds up to a late night hypnagogic nightmare. Yet still I found it comforting! I just don’t get it… While reading it my mind kept returning to color field paintings, where washes of overlapping colors fill large canvases with color, often with no real center, so the eye is left free to wander among the ambiguities. Butler’s prose has this quality, which is perhaps a key to my response in that while reading my mind experienced a ‘hovering’ sensation, becoming almost passive, allowing the imagery to freely float in and out of my grey matter. Perhaps this hovering sensation over-rode the disturbing nature of the text itself; or perhaps it allowed my mind an uncanny access into Butler’s world, which is extremely personal and resonates intimacy on every page. Like a vampire whispering in my ear? If so did Blake Butler seduce me, against my safe-guarding will? Perhaps. But isn’t literature about giving one’s self to another’s self? In this case, Yes. I mean, Yes, I am perverse, and, Yes, that is the point of literature.

[Ben Loory · Rating 5 out of 5]

there was a period many years ago where i had a manic episode and didn't sleep for a week. during that time i became paranoid and depressed and delusional and confused and eventually started hallucinating and, well, it didn't end very well (though on the other hand, i'm still here)... during that time i had a very clear vision of the world as a pointless and joyless playing out of patterns-- inhuman and horrible though often blackly comic-- all of which inevitably eventually spiraled and fizzed into the heat death of the whole universe... needless to say, it wasn't a pleasant experience, so it may sound kinda odd when i say that this book was the closest i've ever come to recapturing that experience-- and i found it absolutely delightful! maybe because in reading it as a book, i could enjoy the beauty in the patterns because i was not involved in them... i suppose it's a little like watching fireworks... if you were exploding yourself, it wouldn't be as much fun...

in any case, this book was amazing... just chapter after chapter of pure story. a pure dream-world in perfect prose. blake butler's imagination is awe-inspiring.

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A List of Locations Appropriate for the Reading of There Is No Year

Outback Steakhouse
A Slaughterhouse
A Church
A Mall
A Factory
An Anthill
A Pod
Arby's
Hardee's
Wendy's
Cracker Barrel
A Cube

[Erica]

I'm just going to cut and paste what I said about this book when I emailed cal, the editor.


I love how it's like a postmodern haunted house story--I keep thinking how it would make such an awesome, trippy horror movie. It's like Amityville horror on acid. But I think someone who isn't as obsessed with horror movies maybe wouldn't see that, and I like that about it too--it's such a blank canvas in some ways. My freshman year in college I took this special seminar on "downtown culture" at the fales library at nyu, which was the first time I read dennis cooper, and this reminds me a lot of the stuff we read, like dennis and lynne tillman. I feel like someone could write an entire paper on like, the meaning of hair in the book. Or the meaning of insects. Or mirrors.

You know, normally I like books with plots. Not like, James Patterson plots, but the kind of books that are relatively easy to describe. And this definitely isn't. But I think what's keeping me drawn in is the fact that along with all the beautiful writing and the bizarre imagery, at its core it's the story of a family unraveling and losing their sense of place in the world, and that's very much the kind of thing I love to read. I feel like there's at least two (probably more) readings of it--you can read it as though it's about a family recovering from a child's sickness and coming apart from each other, or you can read it as a family trapped in this crazy house that's practically eating them alive. It reminds me of Twin Peaks in that way--the way that was either about all this crazy mystical evil, or it was just about a daughter getting abused (at least in the first season.)

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really a fan, although Blake Butler's sustained experimental style is certainly admirable on a technical level. The central problem here is a lack of contrast. Many of the individual passages here are interesting, even moving, and you could see them being powerfully deployed as elements inside of a better novel. But in the context of There Is No Year, the experimentation is literally all there is. There are no characters and only a whisper of a plot. In fact there's barely even reference to recognizable themes or aspects of the world. (Something something illness, mumble mumble suburbia.)

The worst is that Butler doesn't even remain loyal to his imagery. As we go from sentence to sentence, he jumps from experimental conceit to experimental conceit, without pausing to develop any of them. One sentence will have some bizarre/gross imagery, the next will have conspicuously awkward phrasing, the next will use a different font. And so on and so forth. There's no time to reflect on why people are covered with mold or what the black boxes symbolize, when immediately you're trying to figure out what the buzzing electrical sound is supposed to refer to and why he's formatted the text like that. After a certain point you realize: none of it really means anything at all. He's not deploying symbols as we usually understand them, but rather using imagery as a kind of wallpaper or muzak or found-art collage. It's for creating an ambient mood, not for advancing ideas. It's a 400 page trough of word salad. Yum.

So yeah: it's experimentaler-than-thou. Which is fine. He's definitely traveled a few steps further down the road paved by William S. Burroughs and friends. I'm generally on board with this sort of thing. I like dark, challenging fiction. If I had to pick one major influence on this book I would point to the films of David Lynch, and I am a big David Lynch fan. So why don't I find this very compelling? Again, it's the lack of contrast. Lynch's films are powerful because they embed moments of dark chaos within a superstructure of bright, shining Americana. I'm not sure I would want to watch Twin Peaks with no Dale Cooper. And this book is the equivalent of an entire TV show built out of the Red Room/Black Lodge scenes. In the end the author doesn't give much of a reason to care about this for more than a few minutes after closing the book.

[Brandon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Completely horrible and unreadable. This book ranks among the worst I've ever cracked open and that list includes some pretty bad books. You get the sense, reading it, that Butler imagines himself a young Dennis Cooper, but the problem is he possesses none of Cooper's originality or humor, or let's face it, talent. Instead he comes across as the worst kind of poseur wannabe. I read a ton of books coming out of the indie publishing world, and these books generally fall into two categories: 1) Writers who are actually talented and doing something original and interesting with their work and 2) writers who are trying very hard to say “ Hey, look at me, I’m weird and different,” but who ultimately have nothing to say and very little in the way of talent. With Butler’s work, you have the
latter. There's just nothing unique or interesting here. Nothing even imaginative. He’s just being weird for the sake of being weird. It's just that same old "look at me, I'm different" type of writing that ultimately goes nowhere and means nothing. It's sad that trees had to die for this book to be printed.

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jars full of hair. Rooms full of jars full of hair. Halls full of rooms full of jars full of hair. All the hair you've ever grown and ever will grow. You use a towel made of hair to dry your hair after a shower. You also suffer chronic baldness and have never grown a single hair in your entire hair-story.

"Mom, Blake Butler broke in and is smoking Michael Cisco's crack again, please come make him stop!"

[Jasmine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh my goodness, oh my goodness. I started this book a long time ago, actually the same day I started the girl who couldn't come, on the same subway to the same airport, I started this first, then switched cause I got sleepy. Then when David left I picked up escape and some books greg recommended and I'm just getting back to these now.

I don't really know how to talk about this book so instead I think I'm going to pretend to understand readers advisory instead of actually reviewing this.

If you like Mark Danielwinski, Blake Butler will drive you crazy
I know, I know that's not right. When I read this it felt like house of leaves, but butler manages to create the intertextual confusion of house of leaves in a book that doesn't look that different than any other book.

appeal categories

Storyline
Um... I don't know, have you seen the science of sleep, it's kind of like that. It's imagination driven, or dream driven, can I say that? It is not plot or character driven. (complex-non-plot)

Pace
slow but fast. the story crawls, but the book goes by quickly. It's time magic (relaxed pace)

Tone
sad. But not like sad for the sake of being sad, like sad like people who really love each other getting a divorce, or a dad missing his kids first steps. just sad. (bittersweet, disturbing, haunting, melancholy, nostalgic)

Writing Style
Disconnected, minimal, unclear. (complex style, experimental, lyrical, spare, thoughtful)

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imagine Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as written by William S. Burroughs, Tom Robbins and John Updike, minus the traditional narrative flow, embracing instead the texture and feelings of words, their structure and even the tone of paper the book is printed on. It's not unlike staring at a wildly abstract painting an inordinately long time waiting for some rational thought upon which to grab, when the true ride is visceral and not intellectual. Parts of the book are brilliant and parts were just lost on me. I kept repeating the phrase in my head, "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like."

[Christian Molenaar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like DeLillo’s White Noise if it was written by Gary Shipley. Short episodes of darkly humorous suburban satire sloooooowly reveal a surreal underlying plot that ties them together in sequence.
There’s some really trenchant critique of consumerism on display alongside some other segments that bog themselves down in that Banksy-style “boo mass culture” vein that seems far too juvenile for the relatively nuanced parts that make up this novel’s best pieces. Still, when it hits it’s a lot of fun and the increasingly abstract nature of the book as it goes along does wonders for the content. Recommended if you’ve ever wished for a middle ground between House of Leaves and Horrorstör.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

So perhaps it was the microscopically small expectations I had going into Blake Butler's admired yet reviled full-length literary debut There Is No Year that made me enjoy it a lot more than I had been expecting; after all, this experimental haunted-house story and Grand Future Of The American Contemporary Novel has been trashed by readers and critics much more than it's been praised, and I also have to confess that I'm not much of a fan of Butler's popular litblog "HTMLGiant," which I find just much too pretentious for my personal taste. But it turns out that Year is a much different thing than I had been led to believe, and something that regular readers of this blog will be instantly familiar with; basically, it's the most high-profile bizarro novel in history, and if Blake hadn't taken the time to cultivate the New York MFA industry crowd before writing it, it would've come out with a cheesy Photoshopped cover on Eraserhead Press just like all the other bizarro novels I've been reading in the last few years, and it would've had its 75 readers or whatever and Butler would right now be out on the road with Patrick Wensink and Amber Dawn and Eric Henderixson and Ian Woodhead, scraping and hustling for a living, instead of being the star author of the newly artsy-fied Harper Perennial and being feted by the New York Times and all the other wonderful things that have been happening to him lately.*

And so in a way, this makes this the greatest thing to ever happen to the bizarro genre (or "gonzo," or "The New Weird," or whatever term you want to use), because it's like a giant booster shot of validity to all the books that fit within it; and now when these authors are sending out emails and trying to book appearances with all these McSweeney's-loving lit hosts across the country, when describing their books all they have to say now is, "…You know, it's like Blake Butler," and the hosts will say, "Oh, Blake Butler, well, then, come on by!" But that said, let me also confess that I only ended up reading about half of this before putting it away for good; because much like the superior House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski that Butler liberally steals from honors in pastiche style**, no matter how intriguing this kind of writing is, a little goes a long way with most readers, and while I found 200 pages of this to be almost perfect, the 450 pages of its actual length turned out to be way too much. But the good news is that it's easy to read just half of this book and still be highly satisfied with it, because for those who still don't know, there is no real plot to speak of, the aspect that has inspired most of its criticism; it's instead an unending series of exquisitely beautiful prose-poem micro-stories, something like 300 of them that are each only a page or two long, which much like Nathaniel Hawthorne at his best are much better at establishing a creepy, unsettling mood than in conveying an actual three-act plot. A long as you keep all these things in mind, there shouldn't be any reason that a genre enthusiast wouldn't really love There Is No Year for what it is, instead of despising it for what it isn't, and it comes recommended in that specific spirit.

Out of 10: 8.2 (but only if you read just the first half), or 9.7 for bizarro fans

*And I want to make it particularly clear today that I do think that all of Butler's recent successes are wonderful, no matter what I thought of the book in particular; although he and I have never met, we have a ton of mutual friends, and according to them he is apparently a quite gregarious and hardworking fellow who deserves all the successes he's recently been having. I guess I feel the need to specifically mention this today in particular because, after reading up on other online reviews of this book in preparation for my own, I was really dismayed to see just how many of them are in reality these thinly-veiled screeds of naked personal jealousy from other wannabe intellectuals, hundreds of them all along the lines of, "Wish I could string together 450 pages of nonsensical sentences and be called The Future Of The American Contemporary Novel." No matter what the quality of any particular work, I always think it's a shame whenever an author has to deal with a deluge of petty jealousy from the public masked as analytical criticism, simply because he's found success where others haven't; and so I just want to make sure that people don't lump my own criticisms in with the rest of the haters today, even though like them I found this novel only so-so in general.

**And well, okay, technically you could argue that both books actually rip off Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist in the scenes where they overlap; but that's a snotty cocktail-party discussion for another day.

[The Nike Nabokov]

did you like eraserhead?
this guy LOVED eraserhead.

[Michelle]

When Erica from Harper Perennial mentioned that There Is No Year is a challenging book, she was not exaggerating. Mr. Butler's latest novel is virtually indescribable in its plot but powerful in the emotions it evokes. Part poetry, part artistic rendering, it is a novel like no other.

There Is No Year follows, in a very meandering and disturbing fashion, the lives of an unnamed family after they move into their house of dreams. Each family member is haunted by his or her own memories and thoughts. The entire story is told in a dream-like fashion, where nightmares become reality in some way. Rooms mysteriously appear and disappear. Roads lead to nowhere and everywhere. What was once familiar is now strange. The passage of time is arbitrary and uneven. Through it all, the sense of foreboding is unmistakable and ever-present.

Just when the story delves into the most fantastical descriptions, Mr. Butler brings up a scene which diverts the reader's attention back to the normal. Life is not as strange as the father, mother and son would have the reader expect. They still go to work, clean the house, go grocery shopping, go to school, etc. They lead normal lives. Yet, everything they "see", "hear" and experience is anything but normal. Is it mental illness? Are they just dreams? Is it just their mind's interpretation of their experiences? Isn't life dream-like? The answer is up to the individual reader.

There Is No Year is as much a work of art as it is a novel. Told in sparse chapters, the reader needs to pay as much attention to the individual placement of each word as to the words themselves. Interspersed throughout are images devoted to the play of shadow and light, and the pages themselves cover the spectrum of black to various shades of gray and even white. It is simply visually stunning.

The entire novel is meant to be devoured by all the senses. The textures and colors of the pages, the words, and the images are all meant to help enhance the dream-like quality of the story. Yet, it is not a novel that one can simply pick up and read cover to cover. There Is No Year requires careful reading and even more careful thought before the message reveals itself to the reader. Once it does, though, it is well worth the time and effort it takes to get through the novel.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading reviews of this on amazon, and it's really strange to me that so many people knock Blake for "just trying to be different". I'm not sure I know what that means as a criticism. If people were complaining that it was all style and no substance, that would be one thing. But these people aren't really saying that. They're just saying that they don't like that he attempted an unusual aesthetic at all, I guess? To me it makes more sense to create the book in the way you think will best fit both the ideas you have and how you know how to present them. (awkward sentence, i know. sorry.) I think you need equally good reasons whether you're defying or sticking to convention. Okay, enough of that.

This book is wonderful. It was apparently written in less than a week and it feels like it in the sense that it captures the mood of staying up all night and getting really deep inside your own weird thoughts and moods. It flows well and I think the "just trying to be weird" crowd should really give Blake props for how absolutely readable this 400+ page book is. I'm not impressed by the fact that this is a long, weird book with no real plot, I'm impressed that this is a long, weird book with no real plot that is absolutely readable and compelling. THAT'S the achievement and THAT'S why the "just trying to be different" criticism is so baffling. Experimental fiction is generally not that readable, and I am so, so behind making it more accessible while retaining it's essential subversive and disturbing qualities, which this book does effortlessly. Good job, Blake. Good fucking job.

[xTx xTx · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a feeling of being disoriented while reading this book and I think that made me feel, in a way, that I was a part of the book. That I was inside the house. One day I picked the book back up after a week of not reading it and I had lost my page. I tried re-reading pages looking for the familiar but there was none. I knew I had read at least 100 pages but in scanning the chapters could not recall a single thing. I ended up starting over. This also made me feel like I was in the "experience of the book." and maybe that is a good description of this book- it is an experience. Like those rides at Disneyland where you are on a boat, floating slowly through scenes and stories that come at you from all sides in sensory ways even though you are not touching them you are still being touched.

[Christian]

It went from great to truly tedious real fast around the halfway point. I have to learn when to skim and/or DNF.

[Ashley Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was perhaps inevitable that Blake Butler would do this. The seeds were already planted in his haunting novella Ever and his blistering, apocalyptic Scorch Atlas. There was already no doubt that he could write like an angel on bad hallucinogens. But there was no way one could have predicted the horrific tsunami that is There Is No Year - an experimental tour de force essentially unlike anything I have encountered in waking hours. Indeed I read it in a grueling two-day marathon that was not unlike those nightmares one has where one's limbs are frozen and something unseen is pursuing you. Sleep paralysis is not unusual, but it is in broad daylight.

In a blurb for Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations, Thomas Pynchon stated that Erickson "has that rare and luminous gift for reporting back from the nocturnal side of reality..." - it is an accolade that would have worked perfectly for Butler and There Is No Year. Indeed, reading this book is like being trapped in another person's (deranged) psyche. It is, in essence, the story of a family; a father, a mother and a son who live in a melting world that has been assailed by a mysterious `light'. They remain unnamed, generic, which only adds to the sense of inevitability the book seems to exude. Upon finding a new home they also find a `copy family'. But that, it turns out, is the least of their problems. Indeed the `copy family' is the least original notion in a book of utter originality (Philip K. Dick utilised the same notion of simulacra or doppelganger in his 1954 story The Father Thing and it has appeared elsewhere), but Butler uses this trope to chilling affect.

The ever trustworthy Ben Marcus claims that Butler has "sneaked up and drugged the American novel. What stumbles awake in the aftermath is feral and awesome in its power." Feral is a good description here; Butler has gone off the leash, ignoring the rules of both grammar and sanity. Indeed, there is no year here, no month, no day, no hour. There is no distance, at least in the normal sense. But there is a narrative, in a feverish, nightmarish way.

A number of comparisons have already been made to David Lynch (Butler admits to Lynch's dense and macabre Inland Empire being something of an influence) and, inevitably, with both its `haunted house' theme and typographical mayhem, Mark Z. Danielewski's brilliant House of Leaves. Both Lynch and Danielewski certainly hover somewhere in this Stygian night-scape, but There Is No Year stands on its own. Terrifying, ferocious, claustrophobic, a maelstrom of beautifully mangled words, a prose poem of paranoia. Butler has often complained of insomnia, but if these are his nightmares he may well be better off awake.

I received my copy of There Is No Year a day after finishing Joshua Cohen's equally brilliant epic Witz. My love-life, my social life and my day job are in tatters, but Cohen and Butler (alongside such other Millennialists as Ben Marcus, Grace Krilanovich, Brian Evenson, Steve Erickson, Brian Conn and others) more than prove that the Great American Novel is well and truly alive, albeit in wonderfully mutating forms.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is probably definitely something here, though not all of it hangs together and deliberate not-hanging-togetherness is poor recompense. But I am indulgent with experimental indulgence, fits of impatience aside. The reading worked best late at night, sleepily buzzed, undemanding, willing to sample another’s ramshackle picto-textual montage. The book seems stretched between a radical recognition of the literary consequences of the slippery autonomy of the signifier, on the one hand, and generic horror fiction on the other. I do not “understand” the page shading, from bleached white to ashen gray; nor the capricious typographical shifts, sometimes centered, or aligned left or right, or columnar, etc. (spare me precedents, it’s not the device but the implementation here that’s puzzling); and the use of chiaroscuro photography certainly fits the mood but is mostly unmotivated. I will happily confess that after an uninterrupted string of blurry suggestive shapes, insinuated environments, stark interstices, and sundry other befogged images, the sudden appearance of a human form very near the end delivered an undeniably potent shock. Well played. Doubtless the author or a better reader/viewer could contextualize those vague aspects, though yet again, vagaries for the sake of vagueness are tedious. Mimetic evocation of the fraught abysses between perception and memory and language and consciousness and dream, why not, I’ll go with that, the drafty meanderings to and fro or—worse—the loss (theft? primordial absence?) of any distinguishing criterion between nominally separate realms, a fragile stitch made of sheer syntax clutched like Ariadne’s thread through the directionless void between womb and tomb, from portentous big letter to the perpetually reenacted homecoming of punctuation. Surrendering to the independence of logic installs a nightmarish flux where steady discretion should be, ultimately (and obviously) eluding any fixture of strict symbolic or loose allegorical meaning, less as the demonstration of a theoretical ideal than working-through the exigencies of a chosen form. There is no progress or culmination of the episodes except a total effect of finitude disintegrating unto infinity, transcendental pulverization, wonder and terror and boredom indeterminately intertwined.

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

What I Can Tell You:

This was the craziest book ever and I mean that in the nicest way. It was a total, creepy, odd, trippy, journey into the kind of psychological, scary imagery I love in my horror movies. It was like reading a nightmare come to life. There is nothing like this out there.

The complexity of Blake's writing is why I call myself the Amateur Book Reviewer. It would take a semester of sitting with Blake to understand the nuances and details of this story.

The story centers around a family. Mom, Dad and a Son who is recovering from a life threatening illness. When they enter the house there is another family who looks just like they do. They set them outside on the porch and move in. The Chapter have great titles like Room of Hair, The Copy Mother In Particular, Disease Relics, Job (which consists of one paragraph) and more. It is extremely hard to review this book. I would need to read it two more times to fully grasp it, which I don't see it happening for a while due to the volume of pages 401.

Example
Chapter, Night: The mother grew, filled up with nothing - cells in cells on cells, a house.

You can get two distinct stories based on your perception. We could be watching a family living a horror in a house that is literally eating them up alive, mind, body and soul or we can see a family dealing with the devastating cards life had handed them and how they lose themselves in life.

I love everything about this book, the size, the pages, the blurry photos.

If you are looking for something different, this IS the book for you

[Kristopher Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this book. It causes enough existential dread in me for me to like it, but overall it seems like a bit of a stunt, and the imagery is a bit uneven, often cliche. Butler never met a set of parallel mirrors he didn't like (the girl at the fast food place is wearing a shirt with a picture of the man in the car at the fast food place getting food from a girl wearing a picture of a man in the car and yadda yadda yadda ... what are we? in third grade?), and neither he nor his editor apparently know the correct time to use further vs. farther (there are multiple instances of further used in reference to a concept of physical distance). At the best of times, the novel feels like a museum installation designed to show the infinite expanses of oblivion tucked within a common household (holes within holes within holes; emptiness within emptiness; these are central themes to the work), with the house itself shifting and changing as much as any body, feeling at times like a world designed by M. C. Escher, at other times like a world designed by Salvador Dali. But then again, it's all soooo repetitious, and I'm not sure I got anything out of the second two hundred pages than I got out of the first two hundred. A few passages and sentences in particular are quite good, but there are also a lot of passages that feel pointless. I'd be interested in reading something by this writer that was a bit more thought-through and emotionally honest than this one feels.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the blurbs on the back of the book say that it's almost a reinvention of the novel, but I don't think that's quite right. Instead, it feels as if Butler has brought back the epic poem, but steeped in modern poetic sensibilities and replaced the heroic with the existential. It's a bizarre dismantling of modern life, in which the deconstruction of suburbia is mimicked by the deconstruction of the language. Butler will sometimes flip a sentence on its head and what emerges is a wholly new yet perfectly clear form of English, one that is playful in its relentlessness. Because Butler doesn't pull any punches, and he pounds away with dark and discomfiting images. While there is a touch of humor in There Is No Year (as opposed to his bleak beyond bleak Scorch Atlas), there is not much that I found uplifting, and to read the whole novel is to shoulder, at least for a while, the burden of the sometimes mundaneness of existence. The novel is celebration of language and a condemnation of complacency.

[Mark Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm reading this book on New Year's Eve with the the Syfy Channel's yearly Twilight Zone marathon on and I'm thinking, that's right. There is no year. And no nation. And no family. All abstractions that we use to organize the chaos that actually reigns. If the mental reality we live in is essentially abstract, why shouldn't the language we use to describe it be as well? (Revised note: The language later came to seem not abstract at all, but quite concrete.)

There Is No Year seems like something Wittgenstein might have written and then buried somewhere out of sheer embarrassment. That's not to say I'm not enjoying it. I am. Partly because I like trying to figure out what algorithm Butler used to write it. Or maybe better put, what set of rules.

The imagery and the deadpan delivery of the writing reminds me to some degree of a trance film. An elaborated Meshes of the Afternoon, maybe. The emotional "inland empire" is apparently externalized and takes shape as the world. But sometimes I suspect the impulse in Maya Deren, her aesthetic spawn David Lynch and a book like this is less psychodrama and more the strange nature of the phenomenal world as it is. Reality is in itself weird and only our abstract mental moorings fool us into thinking it makes sense.

But I don't want to interpret too much yet, and I'm not comparing it to Lynch, which would be kind of a lazy comparison. But Butler's charged void, as full of amusing baubles as it is, isn't hitting me with the same force that literary cousins like Gordon Lish's Extravaganza and David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress first did, but it's dovetailing nicely with the plasma-screen Rod Serling.

UPDATE: Well, I've read some more and I'm almost ready to discount everything I wrote above. I am amazed that people can write these book reviews with such confidence. I always have to fight the impulse to delete what I've just written. Against interpretation and all that. At any rate, this book is now about life and the riotous fecundity that reality constantly throws in our faces to remind us that our deaths in life are actually part of the great Cenozoic arc. Life is sucked through our bodies until we wear out.

I'm also thinking about schizoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari's proposed alternate to psychoanalysis. Maybe this book is, among other things, a schizoanalysis of a family. There aren't clear boundaries between bodies and things. Much of the prose describes how states of matter and things extend into and out of the character's bodies and how they feel the mutability of their world. It might be too easy to say that the son is caught in some sexuality conundrum or schizophrenic, even if many of his described perceptions echo similar symptoms. That may be just the result of committing to a schizoanalytic approach. Butler may be trying to create a kind of abstract machine out of the elements of a family in a house which reflects how their desires move between each other. The fact that families are usually examined in an Oedipal way, makes Butler's shift in perspective seem radical.

I have no idea whether Butler has even read Deleuze and Guattari. (It's a good bet.) Still, affinities happen and part of the fun of reading his book is to speculate on what his literary-philosophical project might be.

There's also the Deleuzian (by way of Bergson) idea of durational time. Does the title refer to everything existing on a durational (non-linear, everything at once) plane of time? What might that feel like? The crush of everything being in the present. Too much information without it being parceled out over time and even feelings becoming as thickly material as a house or the earth it's built on. Maybe time is what makes reality at all bearable. If we lift experience out of the mercy of linear organization, resulting in the overload of everything-at-once, things may well appear as arbitrary and excessive as they do in this book.

UPDATE: I just had a glance at Butler's Web site HTMLGIANT, which leaves little doubt that his project is to some extent the application of Deleuzian concepts to the novel. One way to see There Is No Year is as the struggle/interaction between the plane of consistency and the attempts (by the characters and/or writer) to organize it, territorialize it, etc. What makes it frustrating is that it is expressed in sensory, subjective description. This subjectivity is the organizing regime, meaning that the novel is neither a portrayal of the plane of consistency, nor of the subjective regime, but both/and, where neither has overcome the other.

Am I giving Butler too much credit? I think possibly, yes. But I am interested in the idea that the appearances of pretentiousness, embarrassment, failure, cliche, arbitrariness, etc. result from the awkwardness of a text continuously being captured and re-escaping organization.

[Jael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first time I can truly say a book has left me corn-fused! I read the pitch e-mail for There is No Year by Blake Butler and was intrigued. There is no clear plot. The characters have no names. The chapters are short, some even have just a few words. The color of the pages range from light to dark. In my opinion, the story isn't linear. It feels like a jumble of thoughts/vignettes cobbled together in a book, but not in a bad way.

We have a mother, a father, a son, and...their copies. Yes identical copies of themselves. The copy family doesn't speak, and eventually they are done away with in interesting ways. There is a room full of hair, holes in the walls that lead to other places, an obsession with ants and heads. An obsession with death, including a list of real-life people who died. Was there a reason for this? There are moments of normality when the family watches television. But then there are moments that are just weird. Eating hair, walking around the house naked, walking through puckers in the wall? Who does that?

Sometimes I thought I was witnessing an alternate reality. Some dystopian society.


"The eye had many sides. Each time the father blinked inside his own sight with the other's -- quick black -- when he looked again the eye would seize. The eye would spin among its sides and scrunch like aged skin, then come to settle centered on another side. Each new side held a new pupil to look into, and it looking back as well, again."


Are they watching some versions of themselves going through life? I wasn't sure right up until the end, and I'm still not sure. Did I miss the clues? Do the pages going from light to dark mean anything? Do the lighter pages mean life is brightening up for this family? Maybe there wasn't anything to miss. As I said, this book left me corn-fused!! This book was outside of comfort zone. Not every book has to have a clear beginning, middle, and end, which is why it's good for me to read books like this. It can get pretty boring if you limit yourself to certain genres and formats, and believe me this book is anything but boring.

My interest was held throughout because I wanted to know what was going on. There are moments that will make you go, "huh?" I liken this book to the Matrix flicks and Inception. Those were movies that I need to see two or three times before I truly understood what was going on. This is a book I'm going to have read again.


Rating: Give it a try


Note: I received a copy of the book from the publisher (Harper Perennial) in exchange for an honest review.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blake Butler's writing is certainly poetic—it's very beautiful, even though it's describing really horrible and disgusting things. I love the style, but for a 400 page novel? It's a bit tough to get through. I'd find I'd go through several pages and only half-remember what I'd read. It was easy to get distracted, to not feel I had to pay attention to details. I was at the last page and didn't even realize it. In some ways, this is a cool effect, because that's also kind of what's going on in the novel. It gives a distorted sense of time while you read, which is also happening to the characters, but it also takes away a bit of the enjoyment. It felt like some of those chapters could've been eliminated even though all of the writing was strong. I found myself paying attention to things like how often the word "nodule" was used. Butler has a genius mind, the way he can continue creating the most bizarre scenarios, and I'll continue reading all of his work, but I just wish this one had been a tiny bit shorter. It's the kind of book that I think a second reading would really benefit for understanding or tying together some ends, but I don't think I could pay attention any better the second time simply because it's so long.

[Terri · Rating 3 out of 5]

There Is No Year is not at all what you would expect from a typical book. Instead of a straight forward plot, moving along to watch the characters change and grow from the beginning, this book takes you right into a more magical realm of the family life.

This book looks at what would seem like a typical family, but with a twist. Throughout the book, you don't feel like you're reading about the father, mother, or son--instead you are falling into an experience. The experience will obviously vary with each reader, but the personal experience I had was a mix between a surreal suburbia and a horror flick. Not only does the words on the page allow you to get deeper than a normal story would, it's also the layout of the words, the ebb and flow of dark to light pages, and the eerie, blurred photos.

This is not by any means an ordinary story, but if you are looking for something completely different, you may enjoy jumping into There Is No Year.

*Reviewer received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads

[Anne B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Say there's someone you don't much like, and this person is buying a new house. (Too much house? Absurd, even? Perfect.) This person likes good fiction and movies, and consumes plenty of both.

Give him or her a copy of this book, and Poltergeist on DVD.

And watch that house FLIP LIKE A BUCKWHEAT PANCAKE.

:)

Seriously: this is a roaring achievement of a novel. A horror story, yes, but also a family romance and a study of grief -- all of which make its sparks of humor more visible, and that much more fun.

There Is No Year is also very much a work of its time (which is to say, this one). Hats off to Butler for having the stones to write of this cultural moment with such terrible honesty. We need it, and deserve it.

Great work. Highly recommended.

[Brandon Tietz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Now that I've read "House of Leaves," it's all too obvious where this book derives from. I actually find it a little messed up how similar this book is to Danielewski's novel: same themes, same imagery, same text play.

I challenge anyone to read "House of Leaves" followed by "There Is No Year" and not see it.

I gave both books two stars. Although Butler's book is highly (blatantly) derivative, I can't deny his work is cleaner and more streamline. However, in regards to story, Danielewski has him beat.

Collectively, I'd prefer both authors to stop screwing around and just give me the story. Beefing up your page count by putting one or two words on a page and calling it "art" irritates me a little.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Painful, nearly perfect.

[Frank Hinton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was great. I don't feel intelligent enough to speak on it. It was moving and emotional and it's logic was wholly poetic. IDK, this is sort of a high-watermark of fiction to me.