To start: a brief review of There Is No Year and Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia

…

_{There Is No Year
by Blake Butler
Harper Perennial
April 5, 2011
paperback
416 pages}

The table was filled end to end with food. There was so much food on the table that there wasn’t any room for plates. The family picked the things they wanted out of the serving dishes, some of which were larger than their chests: pink meats and bruised fruit, slaws and sauces, all soft enough to eat without the teeth, pervaded by a common smell. No one knew who cooked the food. The father assumed it was the mother. The mother assumed it was someone else. The son didn’t think about it–he was already saying his own prayer in his head. The mother and the father waited for someone to say grace. They’d been saying grace for years together though they could not remember who mostly said it for them. They each kept waiting for one another to begin. Each time the father thought to speak up he’d feel like the mother was about to speak herself and so he’d stop and wait and then she wouldn’t. Under the table, the father rubbed his crotch seam with his thumb. He ate.
-page 35, 36

Here: The family is dissolving. The nuclear family is losing its strong force, its weak bond. Or if in this book it’s a magnetism, it sometimes rapidly and violently switches poles. The power keeping the atomic group (mother, father, son, daughter) has and always will be known as knowing; you better feel you know those around you, those in your house. Knowing, the faulty and locking aim and state, is both sun-beaten and eroded in this book.
    The regularly-bound family is contained in a dissolving film, a record, a temple of permanent confusion, confusion that warps in and out of more blank states: anosognosiastic blinds, yearning bases, terror. Knowing, with these bodies and this home (the biggest, sickest body), is now a fully quantic state that both exists and not exists; light is a wave, coming like nausea, and a particle, dirt under your fingernails.

Through these holes the light could enter, thereby: naming, thereby: age. Inside the light and homes the people made more people. The light, unlike the people, went on and on.
-page iX

    Here: light is a menace and willfully malignant. As both a beginning and end marker for the book, it opens and closes the huge sickness that brays for bodies: the father, his wife, their son, their replicas. In this book, light is important and named, then renamed and renamed again, frequently, just language; both are tumorous operatives, endlessly replicating and growing (black boxes appear, swell, spit out more boxes), the language being a particular cancer that communicates obliquely (known and unknown lexicons appear ridged in walls of the family house, on skin in ink, in reflections and air and good and sound.) Sickness, honestly, is an anchor: the son was once sick, the family coped and organized. And for the seemingly burped-out and gleaming whole of There Is No Year, the now-quantum, now-entropic family both fights and welcomes an illness of the foundations of sense: space, time, light. Everything goes soupy. And what is sussed from this book's sound, sense, and story is a truly new way of thinking.

The black creation that’d been seated on the neighbor’s house’s front lawn all this time had by now spread around the structure, further on. It had covered over the old doors and windows with new doors and windows, such as the one the son had come to stand in front of, sopping wet. The son did not see the swelling structure. The son did not see the street, nor his own house there beyond the pavement–the same house they’d live in all these years, they did not know they’d never moved. The son couldn’t see much for all the glaring–even if he had seen, even if he wanted, his house would not be there. The son felt sure that he’d arrived.

Yes.
-page 243