Been Reading So Long It Feels Like Work To Me
A review of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.
I think it’s high time I completed a full-length book review (you can read my short reviews here). In fact, I’ve been waiting for some time for the right book to review—the “right book” meaning a book that captures my interest to the degree that I want to dedicate the word space to it. Then, in the past few weeks, I read two such books in a row. The first, Operation Shylock by Philip Roth, is the book that this review is not about. Why? It’s too good. I wouldn’t be able to criticize it, or even critique it, because it’s so brilliant. All I can say to you about it is to read it, and appreciate it, because there are few novels that are so fiendishly funny and intelligent. The second book was Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and that’s what I’ll focus on here. I’ve chosen to review it because there is a lot to unpack about the book—and because I think it’s worthy of both praise and criticism.
House of Leaves is unlike all other fiction ever published. This, however, is not necessarily a good thing. At over 700 pages, reading the book is quite the investment, and after reading what it’s “about” you'll have to decide for yourself if that’s an investment you’re willing to make. Where even to begin? I suppose I’ll start by trying to describe the “plot,” but it’ll get convoluted quickly, so stay with me.
Okay. The book is presented as being not by Mark Z. Danielewski, who is a real person. Instead, the book begins with an “introduction” by someone named “Johnny Truant.” Johnny, we soon learn, is a 20-something kid in L.A. in the late 90s who does a lot of drugs, fucks a lot of girls, and works at a tattoo shop. Johnny’s friend Lude lives in the same apartment building as a mysterious blind old man named Zampano, who recently died. When the two of them explore the old guy’s apartment, they find long claw marks on the floor and a large black trunk that contains a vast assortment of papers, photos, and other items that Johnny takes back to his apartment and begins to piece together. These papers form a book called House of Leaves, written by Zampano himself.
The next 500 pages are “Zampano’s” House of Leaves, which tells the story of a (fictional) film documentary called The Navidson Record. Told in the style of an exceedingly dense and pretentious pseudo-academic style, Zampano reveals the story of Will Navidson, a Pulitzer-Prize winning photojournalist. After moving in to a new house with his partner Karen Green and their two children, Navidson decided to place cameras in every room of their house, with the goal of creating a documentary of his family coming closer together. Soon, however, he and Karen realize their house is larger on the inside than it is on the outside—including rooms that mysteriously appear overnight, extending walls, and a hallway that sprouts from their living room into absolutely nowhere. This is all evidently from the film The Navidson Record, which Navidson put together from all the home footage he captured.
Throughout all Zampano’s summarization of the film, there are extended digressions on echoes, labyrinths, paranoia, claustrophobia, Karen and Will’s relationship, their children, and much, much more, all told in that academic-article style. This includes hundreds of “quotes” from other “sources,” all of which are allegedly from papers or books by scholars about The Navidson Record—which, remember, doesn’t exist even in Johnny’s world. There are also hundreds of footnotes, both Zampano’s original ones and those added later by Johnny as he reads the book, which usually take the form of several pages of stories of which girl he slept with and which drugs he and Lude did. Johnny also slowly goes crazy as he reads House of Leaves. *sigh*—Very, very crazy. There are quotes in a dozen languages, sometimes translated, sometimes not, and other sections are completely crossed out or missing.
Oh, and often the book requires the reader to turn it upside down or hold it to a mirror to read what’s written, amidst a host of other bizarre stylistic choices, including random word arrangement (often less than ten words on a page), a color scheme (the word “house” is always in blue, every single time it is written), and a variety of fonts meant to signal who is speaking. Right.
Okay, so I’m as much a fan of ambitious literature as anybody, and House of Leaves is, I think, deserving of praise at least for Danielewski’s obvious effort to really go for it. Fuck the rules, break the stuffy old literary conventions, ruffle a few feathers—why not? He wanted it to be different, and that’s fair enough. He shot for the stars and landed at least at Jupiter. The book is certainly unique and weird and intriguing, and most people today seem to consider those three things a hallmark of what is good. Well...not necessarily. Jupiter and the stars are still very far apart.
Consider the unoriginality of a few of the tropes that generate the book’s main structure:
Old creepy mysterious guy dies.
Young guy finds old creepy guy’s weird belongings.
Young guy goes crazy.
Furthermore, there are countless boring overused horror-movie concepts within the “film”:
Big, dark, creepy, cold house.
Threatening auras and the constant idea of “evil just out of reach.”
Bad dreams.
Madness, murder, insanity, death, etc.
Even in the book’s “inventive” structural choices, there are some linguistic tricks that are worthy of an eye-roll:
Words upside down, backward, in different colors, fonts, etc.
Purposely misspelled/miscapitalized/mis-grammatized words.
Endless poems that make no sense and have no relevance to the story.
All of which is far more tiresome than entertaining, which means that somehow House of Leaves is both too ambitious and yet comically unoriginal. But wait, you say. A smart reader, ostensibly, would realize that all the strange page designs and footnotes are just one big joke between writer and reader, through which both can laugh at the ancient literary conventions that constrict us all. Well, maybe. But if that were the case, then Danielewski could (and, I think, would) have made his point with some subtlety. In other words, if it were a joke, the joke wouldn’t have persisted for 500 pages. Though each page presents itself as something new and bold and original, it’s all really 500 pages of the same thing. At some point the earnestness and dedication to the joke reveals that it’s not a joke, or at least completely defeats the purpose of joking. Imagine if you listened to a comedian tell you forty stories in a row about that one time when the outhouse he was shitting in got tipped over. It would be funny at first, of course. But it would get old very quickly.
Some examples of the unconventional page layouts in House of Leaves.
The more I reflect upon House of Leaves, the more I come to realize that the deepest problem I have with the book is that it doesn’t need all the bizarreness it so continuously insists upon. When you finally peel back the endless wrong turns—Zampano’s dense typo-ridden prose, Johnny’s constant interruption with unnecessary details from his own life, the mirror writing, the allusions to scholarly articles that are clearly invented—the tale told by The Navidson Record is incredibly entertaining. I was genuinely intrigued in the story of Will Navidson and his family and friends as they learn that the strange hallway from their living room leads into an impossibly large labyrinth (over thousands of miles) that constantly changes its shape like a sentient being. His efforts to confront this infinitely large house that seems bent on killing them are riveting. But the reader only gets that part of the story every so often, as it is more or less completely buried beneath the footnotes, appendices, poems, quotes, academic diatribes, and the missing pages.
The sheer effort to even get to the parts of the book detailing The Navidson Record delays the suspense for so long that by the time the reader arrives the payoffs are muted and the elation is severely dulled. It’s like climbing to the top of Mount Everest for a McChicken. Sure, if you only have to drive five minutes to get a McChicken, that payoff is worth it. But delaying gratification for something that is not worth that much delay and effort completely negates the effect of that payoff. Such is the experience of finally finding out what happens to Navidson and his family, well over 500 pages in, which could and should have been told to us at page 150.
The book therefore suffers from its weirdness, its desire to be unique. The story of Navidson and his family has enough merit on its own that Danielewski should have dispensed with the silliness of Zampanò, of Johnny, of weird page layouts and endless nonsensical poems, but eventually the silliness is all that I could remember. By the time we learn Navidson’s fate, 500 pages in, I no longer cared to find out, as I had been blunted by the rest of the book’s meaningless and pointless density. To misquote the title of Richard Fariña’s 1966 novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, by the time I was done with House of Leaves I had been reading so long it felt like work to me.
There is a fine line, I think, between writing a book that is engagingly cryptic and a book that is needlessly difficult to understand. House of Leaves, unfortunately, is firmly in the latter category. Danielewski is clearly intelligent, but he is so enamored of his own book’s intricacy that he forgets people would actually someday try reading it. By the end of the Zampano section all he had succeeded in doing was losing my interest—and then I had to slog through 200 pages of meaningless appendices (including poems, photographs, quotes from obscure writers, and more) that did absolutely nothing to illuminate or salvage the 500 pages that came before.
To make matters even worse, there are never any answers. It is relentlessly hammered into the reader’s mind (from both Johnny’s notes about his own life and from Zampano’s description of the film) that there is some evil force just beyond sight or sound, waiting, stalking, hunting, ready to kill, whatever. And yet this evil force never actually materializes. It never comes out. It never is anything. It is so frustrating that Danielewski promises to disclose whatever the evil thing is for 500 pages and then doesn’t reveal it that I questioned whether he was just too lazy to think something up. For example (spoiler alert), the long claw marks on Zampano’s floor that we learn about in the first six pages aren’t explained in the next 694. The book’s close feels like one big cop-out and left me deeply dissatisfied.
And okay, just for the sake of argument, let’s say Danielewski is trying to make some great searching statement about the nature of evil, of horror, of terror. Maybe he’s trying to say that this evil thing is all in the character’s minds, to demonstrate that evil lives within all of us, known or unknown. Maybe he’s trying to say that life is an inherently horrific thing that we all must navigate. Maybe. Even if he is, that’s possibly the least original or insightful explanation ever. Oooh, spooky! There’s evil everywhere! It’s inside your head! Scary houses! Nightmares! Creepy closets! Shadows! Darkness! Guns! Be afraid, be very afraid! Well, Mark, I’m sorry, but I wasn’t. I was just numb.
Read House of Leaves at your own risk. It will entertain, frustrate, baffle, and maybe even engage you. But those 700 pages start to feel real long in a hurry.
