Blake Butler, Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia ** 1/2

This unusual book has some fantastic passages in it. Butler's ability to capture dream states -- or more accurately, waking dream states -- is positively Lynchian. I'll remain haunted by the image of the man in the car outside of his house at night, with the engine running and his stare permanently straight ahead. And by the huge boulder slowly getting closer to falling on his not-sleeping form. And the recurring images of keys for hidden doors.

I also liked Butler's idiosyncratic way of phrasing ("The initial wanted instinct upon first hitting the pillow is to be blank"), including how he always refers to his body in terms of skin or meat, and his odd observations ("The bulk of any house is made of air"). His implicit comparison between the symptoms of insomnia and senile dementia was interesting.

I can't neglect to mention the thematically appropriate glow-in-the-dark Zs all over the cover of the book.

With all of this great stuff, why the poor rating? Because the parts between are filled with academic Deleuze-ian jargon and meaningless flights of pseudo-profound whimsy, during which my mind wandered so much that I may have missed some of the good stuff. The book would have been much more powerful at half of its current length.