Scott Daughtridge DeMer’s debut novel, Then Then Then, is told in fragmentary manner. Fragmentary is not quite the right word—it’s hard to describe the pieces, the moments that make up Then Then Then as fragments, because they’re something different. They are layers. DeMer has attempted to create a novel in the form of a mixed-media painting, with each page serving as a new “layer” stuck on top of the one before; each page “repaints” or rewrites the previous layer with a new stain of ink and a new set of paper fibers.
DeMer’s chosen format is the same as that of his narrator. The unnamed narrator of Then Then Then has spent years creating a multimedia painting that will transform his world and open up a new dimension. Basically, he is hoping to achieve with this painting a process he saw as a child in Remedios Varo’s The Creation of Birds, which displays the creation of something (living breathing birds) out of nothing (the night air). To guide him in his task, the narrator has the work of physicist Katarina Navanri, who theorized that painting, or visual art, can create a powerful energy field. Such a strong energy field can bring into being new particles, or modify the particles currently existent in our world.
The narrator naively believes he can prove Navanri’s theory through his painting, but Navanri, being of course an anagram for Nirvana, is notoriously difficult to attain. Thus, the narrator fails—he’s too desperate, he desires too much, and thus can never be free of suffering or approach the Buddhist conception of Nirvana. Having failed so deeply and thoroughly, he eats his painting in one last attempt, and because his painting has so many layers, each layer full of scraps of whatever the narrator could find over the course of five years—things like nails and discarded hair and needles—it takes forever. He ends up suffering—eating nails is painful!—so much and so constantly that he ends up attaining something else, a brief and fleeting state of being.
DeMer constructs a novel similar in structure to his narrator’s painting to have us parallel his narrator—as we consume the written word on each page, we eat the “painting” of Then Then Then layer by layer. The formatting of each page brings forth this effect. Most pages of Then Then Then contain a rectangular block of justified text, with enormous top and bottom margins, and larger than usual side margins. Immediately upon seeing such a page, we recall an art school student’s stretched canvas: a pure white margin surrounds the medium, the empty space from which neatly placed tape was pulled. Because the text is justified and the margins are so neat, the next page’s writing seems to be written exactly on top of the previous page—a second layer, through which past ink only peeks through above or below, if the blocks are of different length. In any book, ink will peek through subsequent pages, but the clever formatting here allows DeMer’s pages to seem extraordinary, and take on the quality of paint layers on canvas.
This effect is doubled on the rare occasions DeMer breaks his self-imposed formatting. Towards the beginning of Then Then Then, we come across a section with a subtle change: the text is no longer justified, but left aligned. Here, we’re at a point in the narrator’s life before he decided to become a painter; he’s young, he’s at school, he’s considering the Varo painting. This shift marks a break from the multimedia painting of Then Then Then, a break from the book-canvas, showing us also that there is a time order to the layers presented: we’re eating these layers one by one, over the linear course of some time, and we can’t return back to the experience of consuming each page for the first time—now that we know some backstory courtesy of the temporal interruption, our perspective upon a re-read will be different. If we do look back, we’ll find ourselves with only a faint memory of our first reaction, which we will not be able to recreate.
Reading and re-reading any book at all can create such an effect, but DeMer varies his prose style from layer to layer just slightly enough to make the prospect of never being able to go back—of never again being able to experience our initial reaction—something deeply tragic. At the end of one layer, you’ll have a moment of brilliance:
… wheezes a churning echo of nonwords emitted by the schizoid sun iwstrawnk sizma grits-nl pgtobt knuzqrl ccccc tprnvql ozwkka plmowu errqlud ynabrl vcitkn dnercwc xugap bukax rjinsad yzobne tsoneun spletqr awlrfm klkd brqlnoo hcxbs sprout thick stem clusters that latch onto the wall and spread in every direction, stretching for the fucked light.
But the next page starts with:
The footage on the screen shows the fractured world fuzzing with red dust quivering in the air, the graceful balance of math and miracle has been revised, leaving strangled light to glitch.
A change in both content and style that, when formatted in the “layer” style of Then Then Then, feels clunky, and erases the previous layer with a rough aftertaste. And naturally, we keep reading, to find layers that we deem excellent, but once we stumble upon such an excellent layer, we don’t stop, we don’t put down the book—we’re greedy, and we hope the next layer tastes the same. It never does.
Cleverly, DeMer puts us in the place of his narrator, who does the same. The narrator keeps eating layer after layer for the same reason he originally painted layer upon layer: he thinks he’s about to get somewhere, and then he keeps eating or painting in order to stay in that instance, but that moment disappears, never again to return.
Through the forced linearity of his novel and his style changes, DeMer creates a meta experience of his narrator’s timeline. We consume a brilliant layer, and then it’s gone—it’s inside of us and doesn’t exist in the world—we failed, and we should have stopped precisely one moment earlier. There are moments of genius in the narrator’s painting, we’re sure, but he quickly paints over them, or quickly consumes them. And thus he suffers, as a result of time passing—he can’t retroactively realize his mistake and fix it.
It’s hard to directly describe Then Then Then as beautiful, just as the narrator’s painting cannot likely be described as beautiful. However, it is a fantastic physics experiment designed by DeMer, constructed with an architect’s eye. Then Then Then is an experience rather than a novel; we end the book having eaten over a hundred pages of ink and paper, and we are still hungry for more.
Then Then Then, by Scott Daughtridge DeMer. Hamilton, New York: KERNPUNKT Press, April 2025. $12.00, paper.
Ria Dhull is an artist and critic living in NYC. You can find her weekly film reviews at Spectrum Culture and her other writing spread across the web. Her animated short film Seraglio Row is forthcoming.
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