John K. Danenbarger’s ENTANGLEMENT: QUANTUM AND OTHERWISE is an ambitious, genre-bending novel that defies easy categorization. Part sprawling family saga, part meditation on the mysteries of quantum physics and the interconnectedness of human experience, ENTANGLEMENT traces the intertwined fates of a far-flung ensemble of characters—misfits, murderers, strippers, scientists, wounded souls—all bound together, as the title suggests, by a strange quantum entanglement.

The novel’s labyrinthine, non-linear narrative swoops across decades and locations: present-day Maine, present-day Norway, 1980s Massachusetts, 1980s Bermuda, etc. Among the novel’s central characters are Beth Sturgess (who in her youth escaped a life of prostitution and drug abuse through a fateful encounter with Joe Tink) and Kevin Nuss (the affable cop she marries), whose geniality masks sociopathic depths.

Danenbarger’s prose is marked by a staccato rhythm, lending the novel a feverish urgency that mirrors the characters’ tumultuous inner lives: “She turns off the flame. No time for tea. No time for self-pity. Her mind is made up.” Sometimes, however, Danenbarger’s characters sound more like mouthpieces for philosophical ideas than real people. Passages that consider the implications of quantum uncertainty can come across as ponderous lectures: “You can’t even imagine the experience of the person sitting next to you who developed under different circumstances than yours, not only from birth, but also from the advancing flow of life’s evolutionary transformations on each of us, which might take me closer to feeling what a nocturnal bat feels, while you […] are carried closer to a bond with a distant human by a quantum particle.”

The novel occasionally becomes mired in opaque philosophizing at the expense of lucid storytelling. More successful are the moments when Danenbarger puts aside theorizing to immerse readers in finely observed details—the “sudden soft wall” of a dense fog that recalls the “diverting narcotic smog” of Beth’s past; the “sterile cold white fiberglass salon” of a yacht—evoking the physical world of his fictional universe with sensual specificity.

As audacious as its ideas are, ENTANGLEMENT isn’t always easy to get through. Readers must be prepared to put in the work of piecing together a story that has been shattered into shards and spread across almost five hundred pages of densely woven prose. Those who persist will be rewarded with moments of searing insight and passages of haunting beauty. Danenbarger’s vision is a bleak one, reckoning with the cruelty and chaos of a morally neutral universe, but it is not without hard-won grace. In the words of one character:

Every human is like a starling in a flock which seemingly has no purpose. However, a bird doesn’t worry, has no sense of the future, thinks only of the space around it. The single starling communicates with the others about something immediate, but when it drops out of existence, the rest of the flock show no concern and the dead bird is relegated to oblivion, like we all are after a bit of time.

Fans of ambitious, form-breaking fiction in the vein of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves will find in Danenbarger a kindred spirit: an author determined to push the boundaries of narrative to illuminate the human condition in all its messy, mysterious glory.

John K. Danenbarger’s ENTANGLEMENT: QUANTUM AND OTHERWISE is likely to frustrate as many readers as it intrigues, but those attuned to its uncompromising sensibility may find it a rewarding, if challenging, read.

~Edward Sung for IndieReader