I've been sitting here trying to define House of Leaves, and it's one of the most difficult things I've ever categorized. It's a horror story, but it doesn't evolve or resolve quite the way you'd expect a horror story to work. It's a romance, but it's one of the most surreal, screwed-up romances ever. Even its designation of book within a book is hard to pin down, because House of Leaves -- the book -- itself appears within the story, which should be impossible given the circumstances.
Whatever it is, House of Leaves is crazy - and not in an Ophelia-crazy, this-makes-everything-make-more-sense-crazy. No, House of Leaves is off the wall. It begins when Johnny Truant, your average crack-smoking sex addict, finds the work of late blind man Zampano. He's been writing a book about the supposedly famous film The Navidson Record, although there are two problems. One, the movie doesn't exist, despite the book's numerous citations by other authors regarding the book. Two, Zampano could never have seen the movie because he's blind.
So Johnny starts collecting the old man's notes and constructing the book. As he works, though, he himself gets more and more paranoid. His prose starts to resemble Zampano's -- verbose, supremely tangential, and often nonsensical. And once you get into the meat of Zampano's story, you might start to get paranoid, too. The horror of the house is mostly psychological, but tangential enough to provid the book with substance. A minotaur and a shifting labyrinth are involved, but they all seem to be driven by the emotions and mindsets of the characters. Do you really want to know what's at the point directly behind your head, the one you can't see? And when's the last time you measured your house, to make sure it isn't really bigger on the inside?
All this psychological craziness would be pretty difficult to navigate without some outside commentary - beyond the two fairly unreliable narrators. Luckily, the book provides this - in spades, clubs, hearts, and diamonds. There are over four hundred footnotes within the book (not to mention the appendices and index, which comprise the book's final two hundred pages). Most of them refer to alternate critical takes on The Navidson Record, but since it only seems to exist in Zampano's mind, we already know that most of the sources don't exist. (Google a few. I did.) Still, if you look closely, the footnotes give away more than you think at first glance. For instance, some have code embedded in them, especially around the midpoint of the book, when the footnotes and main text start to resemble the labyrinth itself. One had a reference to a story by Jorge Luis Borges, but neglected to mention the source.
The book is very Borgesian in two different ways. First, as you can imagine with the rampant footnotes, plot centering around literary criticism, and verbose tangents, House of Leaves is a parody of literary criticism. Mark Z. Danielewski, the book's true author, worked on his magnum opus for around ten years. Just as I questioned the necessity of writing a book with capital letters or punctuation (Cormac McCarthy's The Road), I question the necessity of taking four hundred pages to make a point. The book is unbelievably dense; the first time I put it down was because I refused to keep reading through the rampant footnotes as they moved all around the page. If Danielewski wanted to be pretentious, he could, just as long as he did so very far away from me. I couldn't stomach it.
But the second time I nearly put down the book, on this reading, it was for a totally different reason: I was legitimately scared. This is the only book I can remember reading to give me nightmares. Beyond the literary criticism is a truly scary story, with almost Aronofsky-like** surrealist twists. I think it's partially effected by the second reason House of Leaves reminds me of Borges. By layering the story beneath madness, peer review, and three or four primary authors, Danielewski tries to make the story a myth in one fell swoop, without having to go through the pesky process of waiting five hundred years for his book to be deemed a classic and read by everyone. Characters whispering with other characters about the significance of a story we're reading now make us feel like we should be doing the same thing. The literary criticism does serve to make a point: the themes of the labyrinth, of blindness, and of observation and criticism are universal, they are important, and they should be considered.
As I said, I'm unsure how to classify this book, but I think that however you read it, the book will deliver. I think it's an important book, and it's certainly one of the most imaginative modern books I've read. It will stand up to years of analysis; the internet will help that, and readers won't get to the bottom of it for a while, if Danielewski worked as long as he says he did on it. But even if you don't want to fetishize this book and tear it apart in minotaur claws, it's a fascinating read. Just don't be surprised if you feel the need to measure your house or look behind your shoulder more often. I certainly do.
**Darren Aronofsky is the director of the recent Black Swan, along with The Fountain, Requiem for a Dream, and Pi.
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