Audacious, rambling ... This author has always reveled in bridging genre and high-gloss literature; here he blends police procedural, the horror of Stephen King and the postmodern density of David Foster Wallace ... This is peak maximalist fiction: a mash-up of famous, forgotten and half-forgotten volumes, a library of an author’s mind. Some readers may find Tom’s Crossing ponderous and bloated, with too many forks in the trail. I advise patience and fortitude: Danielewski’s affection for his characters leads the big ideas much as Tom guides Kalin and Landry higher into the mountains. The narrative beckons us to settle in. Its excesses drive its risks.
Sometimes as I was approaching the end...I had to put the book down for a while to walk in my neighborhood. At least once, I even cried in the newly cool fall air, worn down by the overwhelming bigness of Danielewski’s accomplishment. This is a book like a mountain, so mazed up with crags and canyons that you inevitably lose a little of yourself on the way to its summit ... Tremendous ... I loved this book. I imagine that almost everyone who reads it through will try to heave a copy into your hands. Let me be the first. Pick it up, and be patient with its loping rhythms until you find your own. Gallop or trot real slow.
A work of new mythology at its heart ... Danielewski, here, takes our own places, both mountains and mythos, and builds new worlds from it. It’s a tome of a book, arduous and impossibly thick in its characters and locations, that lives up to its intentions.
Retrograde, a hypertrophy of specificity in traditional narrative and realist style ... Reductive in its overelaborations of the conventional ... 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 ... 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 ... Less enchanting than nostalgic and sentimental, a massive historical fantasy of wishful thinking ... 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.
The novel is not merely long, it’s also a challenging, deliberately arcane work that insists on its own epic status, yet has at its heart a straightforward and compelling story ... Bald summary doesn’t do justice to the ambition of the book or the brilliance of its plotting ... And yet, for all its obvious virtues, I found Tom’s Crossing a baffling and often infuriating experience. Danielewski is a writer of enormous power and vision. He has invented a gripping story with mythic undertones that need no extra emphasis. Yet he makes a number of aesthetic choices that seem deliberately designed to frustrate normal enjoyment of the novel ... Feels as though it’s been written with at least one eye on the literary immortality bestowed by academic study. Its aesthetic decisions seem designed to stimulate seminars rather than enjoyment.
A writer unafraid to place high demands on his readers. Reading his latest is like taking a long, long walk with a virtuosic raconteur, one requiring the occasional scaling of an intimidating peak but also providing views of breathtaking grandeur ... Danielewski’s prose is lush and dialect-inflected, simultaneously ornate and folksy, reminiscent of early Cormac McCarthy. The characters are exquisitely drawn, memorable, and fully human. Mythic in ambition, the narrative is propulsive yet immersive, given to rumination and asides, adding intimacy and emotional resonance. A most resplendent journey well worth the effort.
Epic ... The beauty of this elaborate novel goes beyond the page-turning plot, as the narrative cadence echoes with the clip-clop sound of horses’ hooves on the ground ... A tremendous novel.
A decidedly untraditional take on the Western ... Its only flaw is its excessive length ... Overstuffed, but a daring foray into a genre that’s seen little recent experimentation.
Exciting if long-winded ... Some of the passages verge on pretentiousness, like the pages-long lists of the town’s dead...but the novel is buoyed by its characterizations ... Adventurous readers will enjoy this wild ride.
