“A 12-YEAR-OLD GIRL who finds a cat” has always been the tagline for Mark Z. Danielewski’s new serial novel, The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May (TFv1). And indeed, no spoiler alert needed, over the course of the eponymous “rainy day,” May 10, 2014, Xanther will do just that. But before her LA story even begins, readers must work through 40-odd pages of coming attractions (“New This Season”), the book miming the look of the televisual serial with textual “trailers,” opening billions of years in the future and rewinding through the present before settling in an African cave during the Middle Paleolithic. This front matter foreshadows a planned 27-volume work that would, if realized, likely see the publication of the final episode in 2027.

The “main feature” of TFv1 concerns the events of May 10 and follows nine primary characters, including Xanther and her parents, all of whom are assigned unique fonts to evoke their distinct modes of speech, backstories, and “Affect-Intersectional Motivations.” As the hours unfold, the narrative ranges widely, moving from Echo Park to Venice Beach, Singapore to Mexico, incorporating multiple languages, dialects, and genres. By the end of the day Xanther will rescue and reanimate the cat that will become her “familiar,” a supernatural animal seemingly destined to be her guide and protector, and this cat is just one of many nonhuman entities, animal and technological, that are themselves characters. Readers even meet “Narcons” (TF-Narcon³, TF-Narcon⁹, and TF-Narcon²⁷), nigh-omniscient Narrative Constructs that edit, ventriloquize, and otherwise give voice to characters whose “data points” they claim to know in their entirety.

Such a wide-ranging, multivoiced novel invites readings from many perspectives and areas of expertise; it is perhaps best read in a group, and reading it together inspired our collective response. As reviewers at the outset of a multiyear project, all we can offer is an inventio, the first steps in the direction of developing a critical heuristic, the concepts, questions, and techniques with which sense might begin to be made of this serialized work, the scale of which will eclipse even Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. It is not incidental that the Ancient Greek rhetorician Hermagoras of Temnos should appear just nine pages into the primary narrative, because what one must do at the outset of any inquiry is identify the concrete elements: who, what, when, where, how, in what manner, by what means (quis, quid, quando, ubi, cur, quem ad modum, quibus adminiculis). Bloom’s taxonomy of learning is referenced on the same page, and in its terms our work is less to evaluate (Bloom’s highest level in the cognitive domain) than it is to annotate, mark, and comment upon as we start to familiarize the unfamiliar.

Jeremy Douglass and Caterina Lazzara and Rita Raley and Tyler Shoemaker on The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May