Book Review: House of Leaves
I had gone far far out on a limb by recommending House of Leaves for my book club. It had been in my queue since I had heard about it on Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast. For those unfamiliar with this podcast, the author of American Psycho whinges to different guests about the decline of cinema: how nobody goes to the movies, how films are made for iPads and how PC culture has made Hollywood into a moral safe space unwilling to take artistic risks. True perhaps but it would be better if he stopped pushing this agenda on guests.
He rarely mentions books and it would be far more interesting for him to talk about the state of that medium, ie the one that actually made him famous. Instead he plays the old curmudgeon drawling in fluent disaffected SoCal with the complete lack of self awareness only achievable by a native Los Angelean.
I did manage to catch a moment when he interviewed Mark Z. Danielewski for his debut House of Leaves. Ellis spoke about going away with friends for the weekend. He initially opened the book and saw “footnotes and footnotes in footnotes” and was repelled. For context, Ellis had a long-running objection to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest which he considered prurient sentimentality - there are tonnes of footnotes throughout IJ.
Eventually Ellis spent the whole day reading House of Leaves - with meals passing like mile markers - and finishing it that day. Such a ringing recommendation by the burned out “ya-like-whateva!” Ellis isn’t to be taken lightly.
To be fair it is an intimidating tome. It is heavy and dark and to flick through is to see clashing fonts, strange alignments and pages which have rivers of text along the far edge, text in boxes, pages with only a single word.
One Sunday afternoon I took a very deep breath and began to read. Instantly I was hooked. The book begins with a very Ellisian register - Johnny Truant - a bottom rung employee at a West Hollywood tattoo parlour gets a call from a similar drop kick mate who has found a manuscript in an old neighbour’s apartment, after the neighbour had recently died. Johnny begins to read the manuscript and discovers it’s a criticism written by the deceased man (called Zampanò) about a documentary film called The Navidson Record. To recap aspiring tattoo artist’s friend finds script about a documentary. Stay with me - it’s worth it, I promise.
The film is about photojournalist Will Navidson and his family - once supermodel wife Karen Green, children Chad and Daisy. All have moved into the newly purchased house in Virginia. Will is done with photographing war and famine and has moved to the burbs to save his marriage. Navidson cannot totally hang up his tools and he wires up the house with cameras to document his family’s transition from estranged to happy middle American. Things begin to seem strange when Navidson takes a measurement of the inside of the house which is larger than the outside. Navidson measures and remeasures but still gets he same reading. He calls in help, employs lasers but still the same reading.
Soon Karen installs a bookshelf sitting flush against the wall but soon a gap emerges. The house, it appears, is moving. One night a door appears. Behind it yawning cold blackness - a long long hallway.
And so this is how House of Leaves begins - but zoom back out to Zampanò’s criticism which is a compendium of all criticisms of the film about Navidson’s peculiar house. Zampanò layers on every possible type of academic school: feminist, structuralist, Marxist, etc. It’s fascinating the richness of Danielewski’s various voices, all are authentic and believable - right down to the clever titles of their papers, books or pieces of academic criticism. There is a playful preemptive strike on academia here that is very fun, as if the author wanted to keep one step ahead of the critics that would ultimately review his book. By sheer chance I was also going to suggest Nabokov’s Pale Fire as an alternative that both play with the same form - Pale Fire is a criticism of a poem which depicts the critic as a pompous and willing to railroad the author’s initial intention with his own agenda. So too is criticism depicted here.
Zooming out even further Johnny Truant’s voice is of the down and out, it’s rough and jarring at times but not unlikeable, particularly within the context of the vapid world he inhabits, a world of drugs, booze and one night stands. He has an unmastered soulfulness that serves as redemption of a sort.
All these clashing and colliding narratives are visually represented on the page with colours, mixed fonts, strikeouts, boxed text and brutal alignments and justifications. I understand Ellis’ initial reaction - the perspectives, shifting narratives, multiple languages and word art could be used to obscure poor writing but the writing is actually very good.
The worlds - Johnny Truent, Zampanò’s and Navidson’s are all well realised and combine to produce a work that is delicately balanced. The apparent genius lies not in combining one style with another and thus exploring the potential capacity of the written word but instead conveying the novel’s limitation, especially in the 21st century. House of Leaves has the sense that these parallel worlds are occurring simultaneously, and the gaps in text in particular - either through damage to the original manuscript also when characters decide to stop writing - assume the novel’s central taboo from the outset - it’s ability to capture reality will always be flawed.
If there is one unifying theme throughout it is the sense of loneliness woven throughout all House of Leave’s facets. The distance between the characters exists over both time and space. Zampanò dies and disappears into one void, while many of the other characters disappear into other voids, Johnny Truent is himself a lonely character. The misunderstanding, the inability even with all these words in all these forms for characters to understand each other, even those in intimate long-term relationships is palpable. It’s a tender and subtle theme and it is surprising the author could deliver it within a cacophony of competing forms.