House of Leaves by Mark. Z. Danielewski
Written: May 25 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Everything but Johnny Truant's footnotes
Cons: Johnny Truant's footnotes
The Bottom Line: One of the most interesting books to come along in at least a decade.
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| cdm72's Full Review: Mark Z. Danielewski and Zampano - House of Leaves |
Where to begin?
House of Leaves is a novel, written by Mark Danielewski. House of Leaves is the title of the manuscript Johnny Truant finds when his friend Lude calls him in the middle of the night to help him with the belongings of Lude's dead neighbor, Zampano'.
Let's start at the beginning.
Will Navidson and his family (girlfriend Karen, and their two children, Daisy and Chad) move into a new house in Virginia. Navidson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and his idea is to place Hi 8 cameras
everywhere in the house and film the process of a family moving into and beginning to occupy a new house. Some time later, they come home from a weekend in Seattle to find a new closet in their bedroom. The Hi 8 cameras are all on motion sensors, but looking over them for the week they were gone, Navidson finds nothing, no action, no people coming in to build this new closet. But still there's this
new closet nevertheless.
Then there's the hallway. It just appears one day, even though the wall in which it appears is an outer wall and, going outside, there is no hall, just the outside of the house. But from inside, there's still this hall.
And one other thing. Curious (but curiously unsettled), Navidson decides to measure the house. And he finds that the inside of the place is 1/4" bigger then the outside.
Then one night Navidson decides to explore the new hallway. He finds more hallways, door leading to empty black rooms, and more hallways. But where do they lead? Nowhere so far. But it would be a lot easier to tell for sure if the damned walls would stop shifting.
So an expedition is mounted, Navidson bringing in a team of mountain climbers to explore the hallways. What the team finds is a spiral staircase. Going down. Provisions are gathered, equipment brought in, and the team starts down. Days later, they reach the bottom. What they find is more hallways and empty black rooms. They explore a little more, then begin their ascent.
Things go bad and Navidson, his brother Tom, and friend Billy Reston go in to rescue the three lost in the house.
When Navidson and company start down the stairs, however, they reach the bottom five minutes later. The staircase has grown considerably smaller. In fact, the only thing that seems to remain the same is the hallway leading in.
So everyone makes it out except Navidson. When a pulley is set up to hoist the dying first team, all is good, until the stairs grow again, leaving Navidson alone at the bottom. And this time, when a quarter is dropped to determine the depth, it's calculated at just over half the depth of the earth.
Meanwhile, back in the world of light, Karen just wants to leave.
Five days later, Navidson reappears. But before they can get out, the house swallows Tom, Navidson's brother.
They abandon the house and begin healing. But Navidson can't let it go. While Karen and the children return to New York, Navidson returns to the house. In one of the most interesting and unsettling passages I've read in a long
time, Navidson becomes lost in the interior of the house, finally realizing there's nothing below him and he's falling. He's been falling for hours. All of this is captured on Hi 8 and the last thing we see is a small light flicker at the top of the frame, then the film runs out.
That's the story of The Navidson Record, the documentary that came from the hours and days of film Navidson captured and Karen edited.
Zampano's book, House of Leaves, is about that film.
And this is where things get confusing. This is a book about a book about a film that never happened.
Navidson made the film, Zampano' wrote a book about the film, Johnny Truant found the book, and, after some editing and extensive footnoting on his part, published it.
Few books have made me wish I'd stop reading in the dark. The Shining. It. Ghost Story. And Communion. Now House of Leaves. The Navidson house has a habit of groaning when it shifts inner structure. And what house doesn't groan, right?
Hey, you don't know WHERE your closets lead when the door's closed.
This is a book written like a legitimate film critique, with references and footnotes to made-up texts and theses written about the Navidson house. Every effort is made to "authenticate" the story, going so far as to include an
entire chapter that Zampano' has stricken. If you want to read it with a black line going through it, go ahead. And there are pages full of nothing but X's, where ink has spilled or Zampano' has tried to burn away portions. It's all very structured and very realistic and very fun to read. Except for Johnny Truant.
In preparing the manuscript for publication, he's gone through it himself and made his own footnotes. Unfortunately, most of his footnotes deal with what's going on in his own life and how the reading of Zampano's manuscript is tearing at his grip on reality. He sees shadows following him. He hears growls and knows there's something coming to get him. He's got measuring tapes
nailed to his walls and floors.
Reading of how the book is affecting Truant is fine, but sometimes his footnotes read like acid trips (ever read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?) and he rambles on and on about women he's met and slept with, drugs he's taken,
and how he's not sure any of it is really happening.
Truant's footnotes have a place in this book, but it's a place that should have been whittled down considerably.
The story of Navidson's exploration into the house are the heart of the book and the most interesting part, but Truant's rambling footnotes come in the middle of the Navidson narrative and disrupt the flow. Six pages later,
when we get back to the story, we forget where we left off (sometimes in the middle of a sentence).
So what we've got here is this. Navidson made a film about his house. Zampano wrote a book about the film about the house. Truant amended and published the book about the film about the house. We read a book about the book about the film about the house.
Got it?
The funnest part of reading House of Leaves was the layout. During the exploration scenes, Danielewski has decided to play with the reader. At one point, where Navidson is climbing a set of stairs he's found in the
darkness, the words go sideways and we must read left to right the bottom line, the climb up one line, read left to right, climb up a line, read left to right.
When Navidson finds himself in a passage that's slowly closing in around him, the words begin to close in together on the page until finally we're reading only a few letters per page, until the corridor begins to widen again, and with it, the words on the page.
I read in an interview with Danielewski that he spent a week at the Pantheon offices doing layout for the book. It shows, and it paid off. Wonderful job.
In fact, other than Johnny Truant's intrusiveness, I loved this book.
Then there was the end where Johnny Truant overstays his welcome.
Once the original Zampano' text is done, when we've read House of Leaves, there are more pages. At least 50 of them dedicated to reprinting letters Truant's mother wrote to him while in a mental hospital. And I understand their
purpose in the context of the book?at least I THINK I do. It seems the letters may be an insinuation that none of this is happening, that the insanity that claimed his mother is genetic and everything we've just read was made up in Truant's mind. At least, that's what I got out of it. After all, a number of times we're told the Navidson film doesn't exist.
But, as a reader, the book's impact is in the Navidson story and anything extra that suggests it's not real takes away from that impact.
All things considered, House of Leaves is a HELL of a book and one that's going to make you slow down, take your time, and soak it up, because this isn't one of those sit in front of the fire and while away a rainy day books. This
book is a commitment and it tries it damndest to bring you into its world, something too few authors seem concerned with anymore.
It took Mark Danielewsi ten years to write this book. I think it was worth every single day.
Recommended:
Yes
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cdm72
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