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Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel has a lot going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampanò, about a nonexistent documentary film--which itself is about a photojournalist who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.) In addition to this Russian-doll layering of narrators, Danielewski packs in poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, appendices of fake correspondence and "various quotes," single lines of prose placed any which way on the page, crossed-out passages, and so on.
Now that we've reached the post-postmodern era, presumably there's nobody left who needs liberating from the strictures of conventional fiction. So apart from its narrative high jinks, what does House of Leaves have to offer? According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampanò's work, once you read The Navidson Record,
For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.We'll have to take his word for it, however. As it's presented here, the description of the spooky film isn't continuous enough to have much scare power. Instead, we're pulled back into Johnny Truant's world through his footnotes, which he uses to discharge everything in his head, including the discovery of the manuscript, his encounters with people who knew Zampanò, and his own battles with drugs, sex, ennui, and a vague evil force. If The Navidson Record is a mad professor lecturing on the supernatural with rational-seeming conviction, Truant's footnotes are the manic student in the back of the auditorium, wigged out and furiously scribbling whoa-dude notes about life.
Despite his flaws, Truant is an appealingly earnest amateur editor--finding translators, tracking down sources, pointing out incongruities. Danielewski takes an academic's--or ex-academic's--glee in footnotes (the similarity to David Foster Wallace is almost too obvious to mention), as well as other bogus ivory-tower trappings such as interviews with celebrity scholars like Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom. And he stuffs highbrow and pop-culture references (and parodies) into the novel with the enthusiasm of an anarchist filling a pipe bomb with bits of junk metal. House of Leaves may not be the prettiest or most coherent collection, but if you're trying to blow stuff up, who cares? --John Ponyicsanyi
From Publishers Weekly
Danielewski's eccentric and sometimes brilliant debut novel is really two novels, hooked together by the Nabokovian trick of running one narrative in footnotes to the other. One-the horror story-is a tour-de-force. Zampano, a blind Angelino recluse, dies, leaving behind the notes to a manuscript that's an account of a film called The Navidson Report. In the Report, Pulitzer Prize-winning news photographer Will Navidson and his girlfriend move with their two children to a house in an unnamed Virginia town in an attempt to save their relationship. One day, Will discovers that the interior of the house measures more than its exterior. More ominously, a closet appears, then a hallway. Out of this intellectual paradox, Danielewski constructs a viscerally frightening experience. Will contacts a number of people, including explorer Holloway Roberts, who mounts an expedition with his two-man crew. They discover a vast stairway and countless halls. The whole structure occasionally groans, and the space reconfigures, driving Holloway into a murderous frenzy. The story of the house is stitched together from disparate accounts, until the experience becomes somewhat like stumbling into Borges's Library of Babel. This potentially cumbersome device actually enhances the horror of the tale, rather than distracting from it. Less successful, however, is the second story unfolding in footnotes, that of the manuscript's editor, (and the novel's narrator), Johnny Truant. Johnny, who discovered Zampano's body and took his papers, works in a tattoo parlor. He tracks down and beds most of the women who assisted Zampano in preparing his manuscript. But soon Johnny is crippled by panic attacks, bringing him close to psychosis. In the Truant sections, Danielewski attempts an Infinite Jest-like feat of ventriloquism, but where Wallace is a master of voices, Danielewski is not. His strength is parodying a certain academic tone and harnessing that to pop culture tropes. Nevertheless, the novel is a surreal palimpsest of terror and erudition, surely destined for cult status. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Full of hot air,
By john (New York) - See all my reviews
This review is from: House of Leaves: The Remastered Full-Color Edition (Paperback)
This is the most phony, dishonest, arrogant piece of writing I have ever encountered. Amazing what a bunch of silly type-setting can do to reviewers.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
House of Psychobabble...,
By A Customer
This review is from: House of Leaves: The Remastered Full-Color Edition (Paperback)
To the reader who looks at this book and thinks it is intriguing, they are right. However, when one delves a bit deeper into this book they find it is nothing but hogwash. This book makes fine kindling for fires, I must say. I opened this book to find nothing but psychobabble. A jumble of random pages strewn together to form a story. The pages vary from vast, typewritten monologues to blank pages with the word "the" to fill the space. There are pages with just dots and lines, some form of modern art perhaps. One page even has a random musical staff on it with notes. On the pages that are filled with words, some are upside down, some are crossed out, some paragraphs are boxed by blue squares. At the bottom of the pages is random, seemingly fabricated sources for the information. The book is not a novel, but rather a bunch of scrapped together stories to form a whole. It is rather pretentious and confusing. I felt stupid while reading it when I found a bibliography with psychiatric journals in the middle and then at the end when the index indexes every word ever used in the book, from "bat" to "hair" and beyond. Do yourself a favor and skip this book. Read some good literature, like Kerouac or Kesey or Burgess or Joyce. A bookseller I was talking with dismissed this book as B.S. and he was right. Stay out out of the "House of Leaves"!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
NEEDS A NEGATIVE AMOUNT ON THE STARS,
This review is from: House of Leaves: The Remastered Full-Color Edition (Paperback)
I like all kinds of books. But this is the most sick and twisted "book?" I have ever (tried) to read. What a waste of money! After trying to wade through this mess I finally decided that I don't care what happens to these people. They can stay in there huge dark pit and no one would ever miss them, or care. The headaches I got trying to figure out this massive mistake for a novel just wasn't worth it. What's with all the swirls and backward paragraphs and even two seperate stories on one page? I tried to like this. I really did. I kept telling myself, " It will all come together, it will all be worth it with a fantastic story, these people will really begin to matter to me...". NOT SO!!! Life is too short to waste precious minutes with novels like this when there are so many wonderful books that trap you, change you, make you think and feel. NOT THIS ONE. SAVE YOUR MONEY!!!
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