There Is No Year: A Novel [Paperback]

Blake Butler (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 5, 2011

"Butler is an original force who is fearless with form. . . . [an] inventive and deeply promising young author." —Time Out New York

"[Butler's] sentences. . . twist and evolve, and there's a perverse joy that comes from watching just how his paragraphs are shaped, of tracing their contractions and rhythms." —Flavorpill

With echoes of Justin Taylor, Tony O’Neill, and Dennis Cooper, breakout novelist Blake Butler delivers a wildly inventive, impressionistic novel of family, sickness, and the wrenching birth of art. Evocative of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and the films of David Lynch, There Is No Year offers a fractured, dystopian parable about the struggle and survival of art, identity, and family. As the Toronto Globe and Mail says, “if the distortion and feedback of Butler's intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

The mother, the father, and the son move into a new house, and the strange occurrences begin. First, they must remove a copy family�identical to the father, the mother, and the son in every way save for their moldy teeth�from the house. Then they begin exploring the house�s many rooms�including one full of human hair. They gorge themselves on an impossibly large meal, and the mother finds a strange egg that causes all manner of bizarre things to occur, depending on where she touches it. Written in short, vignettelike chapters, this novel is intensely surreal and abstract. At times grotesque, at times sexual, always pushing the bounds of plot, form, narrative, and reality, the novel presents a demanding yet unique read. While the general state of anomie presented leaves the reader always guessing at the meaning of any given scene, the overall effect creates an interesting and convoluted tale of a family in distress. --Julie Hunt

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; Original edition (April 5, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061997420
• ISBN-13: 978-0061997426
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 1.1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #601,651 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars There Is No Point June 22, 2011

By CammySays

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm not sure if I can accurately explain why I don't like this book to anyone who hasn't read it already, but I'll try my best.

Blake Butler is trying to be different; this much is painfully clear. The entirety of the book, while undoubtedly has some deeper meaning or is meant to be an allegory for something I'm not sure of, doesn't seem to have a purpose. There is the father, the mother, and the son (unnamed, uncapitalized) who all appear to be having fever dreams and bad acid trips simultaneously for the duration of their lives in a haunted/cursed house. Rooms fill with hair, objects teleport, someone coughs up a key or a black box or hair or streams of skin at any given moment, all arbitrarily; none of it seems to serve a purpose to the plot. There is no plot. Nightmarish things keep happening and when the thing is done happening, it's as if it never happened in the first place and nobody seems to care at all, or even notice. Butler also really likes the words "certain" (in the context of "a certain place" or "a certain knife") and "pucker/puckered/puckering." Try to find a chapter that doesn't contain these words at least once. I'm all for repeated words setting some sort of theme but he repeats them to tedium; I barely know what they mean anymore.

It's as if he read Tao Lin's Eee Eeeee Eeee and said to himself, "I can be weirder."

The other reviewers seem to generally be praising this book for it's poetic-ness or illusory intensity or some such mess and are recommending it. I'd say I have to recommend it too but not for any of the same reasons. Maybe I just didn't "get it," but his book is certainly interesting. It's an experience, recommended in the same way you'd recommend your friend to smell whatever is inside this bag because, dude, this bag smells so bad you just HAVE to smell it. You have to know what it's like. Maybe you'll end up liking it, the way some people like the smell of iodine or nail polish remover. I prefer smells that don't make my eyes burn.

21 of 29 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Haunted House April 5, 2011

By William Kennedy

Format:Paperback

Blake Butler's first full length novel defies convention. Following a similiar pattern, if not storyline, to "House of Leaves," Butler nonetheless manages to take familiar terrority and reinvigorate it with a kind of frantic energy.

The plot of this novel is difficult to describe, it is a series of vignettes and snapshots that mostly take place within the confines of an ever shifting and malevolent house which was occupied by replicas of the family who just moved in.

All of this is rendered in occasionally mangled and caffeinated language, which adds to the overall affect of uncertainty and horror.

Although this novel is experimental in every sense of the word, it does lack coherence and a basic understanding of what makes literature so powerful. Blake Butler is a talented writer, but he bucks convention seemingly just for the sake of it. The words he uses, the sentences he constructs are all compelling, but ultimately disappointing. He repeats words and phrases, some sentences are incredibly short and non-descriptive. Is this style or laziness?

I read that this book was written by Butler in an attempt to see how quickly he could write a novel. I'm sure that many authors would cringe to hear that statement, after all, how insightful or beautiful, or challenging could a book be if it was written in a storm?

I think the more difficult task would be to write a novel with a cohesive plot and developed characters.

Most of the chapters in "There Is No Year" are only a couple pages long. Some pages only contain a few words, some are blank, some are random pictures of nothing in particular. Sometimes the "story" is strange for no reason at all...seemingly.

If all of this makes it sound like I didn't enjoy the book, that really isn't the case at all - I actually enjoyed this novel immensely. Butler is the harbinger of a new kind of novelist. One who's never read the classics, spends hours on the internet, and tries to see how fast he can write a book.

Still and all, there is something here. Butler has not yet grown into the novelist I'm sure he will become. He will be someone to watch in the future.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars This book is evil. February 1, 2013

By Don Lovett

Format:Paperback

Just talking about the levels of disturbing in this book makes my best friend literally feel sick to her stomach. Sure, it's poetic and stylistic, but everything in it seems designed to stab you repeatedly in the soul. It violates reality and sanity in ways that should not be. I intend to destroy my copy- haven't burned it because I might accidentally inhale something that used to be it.

I can't really say anything about the plot, because there isn't one. Time seems to not really exist in it, I honestly have no idea what order events are supposed to come in because they sure aren't linear.

I do not recommend reading it. I do not recommend touching a copy of it with your bare skin. If you gave this a positive review, please seek psychiatric help.