House of Leaves

This book is the Holy Bible for every pseudo-intellectual or hipster who thinks linear narratives are too mainstream. It took me a bloody while to get through this ripper because I kept giving up. It's the literary equivalent of talking to an institutionalized nutcase who tries to tell you his life story but keeps changing the facts around because his multiple personalities jump in with their own versions. It's a nightmare.

When you open up to the first page you'll find it devoted to a single line of text. "This is not for you" it reads, which is so freaking true. It's a kind of anti-dedication in a way, if that can exist, but it's also a warning for every normal person of sound mind who makes the horribly misguided decision of trying to read this book. I consider myself to be a keen reader when I can actually be bothered to read, but with work, homework and an entire internet at my disposal it's hard to prioritise reading. I see it as a form of recreation. If I've got nothing else to do then I'll read, but this book is anything but recreational. This book is a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle and I mean that literally. Just look at the page layout.

What the hell??? If you were after one of those "traditional" books where the text starts at the left side of the page and ends at the right, at which point you get a new line of text arranged in much the same way, then you'll have to look elsewhere because this book is indeed not for you. Many pages of this book consist of blocks of text sitting inside other blocks of text so that it looks like a collage or like a typewriter had diarrhoea. Some pages only have one or two lines, situated in the centre of the page or off to one side, because the author thought a great way to get the reader involved in what was going on would be to have the words mirror the actions of the characters. The book also makes excessive use of footnotes, and some of these footnotes themselves contain footnotes. Footnotes within footnotes? What will they think of next???

Now, let's get into the plot. The story of House of Leaves is a very complicated one, so bear with me. House of Leaves is a book about a guy called Johnny Truant who finds a manuscript by an old man called Zampano which is an analysis of a film called The Navidson Record by a guy called Will Navidson about a house whose dimensions are larger on the inside than on the outside.

Did you get all that? The whole thing is intricate and layered to the point of gratuitousness. This story alone is half the reason this book is basically unreadable. But anyway, more specifically, the story is a Blair Witch-style horror story (sort of) which flaunts itself as a collection of documents which someone chucked together and released. So what you end up with is an explanation of the events in the Navidson Record framed by zillions of footnotes which reference material outside House of Leaves and detail Johnny's sex life for some reason. We also get editor's notes and references to other parts of the book in case some of us are interested in flicking back to earlier parts to make sense of whatever the hell is happening in the right now.

What about the characters? The book DOES have characters, they're just really weird. Johnny is a twenty-something hipster living in LA (although he represents what a hipster was back in the nineties which makes his subplot feel very dated). Johnny finds Zampano's manuscript in his apartment after the old man dies and decides to publish it with some of his own stuff inexplicably sprinkled throughout. So you'll be reading about this effed up house and find yourself feeling more and more interested when suddenly the story turns into the time Johnny went over to this girl's house and had a threeway with her and her friend or some shit. Great! I don't care! Did I mention Zampano is a blind movie reviewer. This is all we learn about his character and I can't for the life of me work out why this is in the book. Is it meant to be some kind of attempt at satire, having the only person who has seen the Navidson Record be a blind man? Is it a comment on the film industry or is it just stupid? I vote the latter.

Will Navidson seems like someone we could actually relate to. So does his wife. Will is a Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist who decides to start a new life with Karen and their two kids. They move into a seemingly normal house on Ash Tree Lane and for a while everything is hunky dory. The unusual thing about Will, though, is how the author decided to make him a fictionalized version of Kevin Carter, the famous (and late) photographer. Will wins the Pulitzer Prize for taking the photo that Carter took, of a starving child lying in the desert while a vulture looms nearby, which is weird when you consider that House of Leaves is supposed to be a real document. What do you get when something that's supposed to be real is filled with things that can't possible exist in the real world? A headache. That's what.

So Will decides to measure his house for some reason I can't remember, and in doing so realizes that the dimensions of the interior fail to match up with those of the exterior by about a millimetre. He takes his findings to every expert and scientist in America and they all try their best to prove him wrong but at the end of the day there's just no denying that his house has some serious Cube 2: Hypercube shit going on with it. After that they notice a door where a door didn't use to be, and when they open it find a dark hallway leading off into nowhere. Because humans have that natural curiosity for exploration, without which we wouldn't have good old Aussie or the United States of America etc, they decide to hire a team and explore this dark void, and that's where the author decides to break out some experimental shit and have pages with only three words on them and stuff like that. It's meant to create an atmosphere of claustrophia and isolation as the team explores these dark, seemingly endless parts of the house and in some places it works quite well.

Other stuff happens too. At one point the house goes batshit insane and kills some of its occupants which was probably the most intense part. But after the book is done with Zampano's analysis we get this bit called the Whalestoe Letters, which is a series of letters written to Johnny by his mother during her years spent in the Three Attic Whalestoe Institute. As beautifully written as they are, they're...well...fucking pointless. They add nothing to the story other than to provide Johnny with a past. But I don't give a rat's about Johnny's past because I picked up House of Leaves so I could read about a weird house. Not a guy who drinks, fornicates, goes insane and ultimately disappears off the face of the Earth.

Ultimately, like the house on Ash Tree Lane, House of Leaves is a labrynth. A maze of avant-garde story-telling techniques. It says it's a novel (on the front cover it says House of Leaves - Mark Danielewski: A Novel) but what it really is is an explosion of poetry, technical flourishes, in-your-face intellectualism and semiotic bullcrap which the author has swept up into the pages of a book. Because of this there is no point in the story where you are able to forget you are reading a book and become absorbed in what's happening. It insists on itself far too much.

Another thing it does, which I forgot to mention earlier, is to have every instance of the word "house" appear in blue text. Why this is I don't know, but plenty of pretentious people say it's an allusion to the blue screen. You know, like in movies.

Whatever.

So I wouldn't recommend it, but if you like that sort of thing then by all means give it a go.