#47 House of Leaves

When I worked at Barnes & Noble, two books were recommended to me more than any other.  From the customers and employees, the first was A Game of Thrones.  From just the employees, I was constantly told to read House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.  So I was already planning on reading this when I found that ridiculous list that threatens to consume my life.  In fact, I checked both books out at the same time, not knowing that it was already on the list.

I had some trepidation in starting this one.  This is not the first of Danielewski’s books I’ve read.  A few weeks before, I came across The Fifty-Year Sword, which turned out to be a pretty cool little horror tale but had an annoying narrative style I almost didn’t make it past the first thirty pages.  The Fifty-Year Sword has five narrator’s and they all speak on the same page; the only way you can distinguish them is that their fonts are in different colors, but because they are interrupting…

            …correcting…

                        …telling the facts as they are…

            …which, didn’t you realize how that afternoon when she sat down to take her morning pills that Mr. Chardanay…

…you’re getting it all wrong…

                        …as they actually took place.  And it isn’t very nice of you to…

            …coolly sipped his cocoa with that twinge of disgust…

…and it goes on and on and on like that the whole stinking book.  I was concerned about what post-modern tricks he was going to pull on me with House of Leaves.  He does pull a lot of literary stunts and what I’ve taken to call “cinematic tricks” through his story, as well as having two narrators, but this is handled better in this book than it was in the second.

House of Leaves is about an American family who buys a house in Virginia; at first, the house is perfect for them, a place where the parents especially can work on their relationship.  He has constantly been gone for his work as a photographer and she has had her share of indiscretions in the past.  Navidson, the father, has set up video cameras in every room of his house to make a documentary of the simply life when the house itself goes crazy.  The interior dimensions start to become larger than the exterior, and then a hallway appears that just seems to grow and grow, eventually leading to many rooms and a staircase that never seems to end.  And Navidson (because everybody in a haunted house story is intelligent) decides to document the whole thing.

Indeed, the novel is written as an essay studying the movie that Navidson made.  The first narrator goes over the family dynamics, the other people brought into the story, comments on the five explorations down the hallway, as well as his opinions about the camera shots that were used.  There are also copious footnotes, which is never a bad thing for me.  In cases like Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell or any of Terry Pratchett’s novels, the footnotes are even more interesting that the main story itself.

There are times when House of Leaves feels like reading Moby Dick.  Half of Moby Dick is reading story and the other half is a dissertation on the whaling life.  There are times when half of House of Leaves is about the family and then the other half is all on the psychology and science of the house itself.

There are some literary stunts he uses; there is a chapter where he talks about Navidson and his brother, comparing their relationship to the biblical Jacob and Esau, and the pages are set up in columns resembling scripture passages.  But more obvious are the cinematic tricks.

Cinematic tricks are when the author doesn’t just write the words but uses them in such a way to convey a picture on the page.  Some obvious cinematic tricks I’ve seen before were in The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket, where instead of describing how dark the elevator column was, Snicket gave us two pages of ink squares; and the ending of The Host by Stephanie Meyers has an intermission designed to make you think that this is the end, and could have been the end.  It certainly gave a distinct feeling of death and nobility of sacrifice, as well as need for meditation.

Unlike these books, though, Danielewski tries much more subtle cinematography with his words.  Several footnotes extend over many pages and one of them is laid out in such a fashion that reading it feels like you’re looking through a window or crawling through a tunnel.  And in the last two explorations, the pages are set up in a way that there is only one sentence per page, but each sentence is deliberately places with at the top, bottom, center, diagonally, upside-down, or vertical, all to give you a sense through the words of where the explorers are physically, when they’re lost, the sense of vastness of their supernatural home, as well as the claustrophobia or solitude they feel, as well as the danger they’re in.  I can see how others may get annoyed with this (I usually do) but this was so well done.  I didn’t get the sense that Danielewski was showing off at all but was deliberately trying to bring a specific emotional response from the reader he may not have gotten in any other way.

The Navidson portion of the book was great and well worth reading if you want to see what new things are being tried and done in our century for literature.

I’m not recommending the book to any of my friends. It has to do entirely with the second narrator, Johnny Truant.  Johnny is a stoner who discovers the Navidson Record.  He writes the introduction to tell of how he came across the Navidson story, and many of the footnotes are his thoughts and stories from his life, and how reading the Navidson Record is ruining his life.  He is a very unreliable narrator; over half the time, you cannot trust that he is “telling the truth.”  He constantly contradicts his own statements and you’re left not sure which statement was correct, the first or second.  He turns out to be a pretty rotten human being, too.  The alcoholism and drug use is merely the tip of the iceberg; the guy gets around more than James Bond, screwing every girl except the one he has a crush on (assuming, again, that he’s “telling the truth”), and as the story progresses, as he starts to go insane and murderous, he is less and less pleasant.  Instead of the fear I was getting from the house portion (which is what a scary story is supposed to do) I was getting angrier and angrier with this guy and wished that he would just die.  No satisfactory answer to that; I’m still not sure whether he committed some form of supernatural suicide or if he took the final step into insanity and went comatose.  I spoke with my manager about that; she said that she liked how it left you guessing.  I just thought the whole portion was stupid and made me a little sick.

Such a pity, because that core story is so amazing.  The Johnny Truant portion covers it like so much coal that I can’t appreciate the diamond underneath.