Review – House of Leaves

House of Leaves

Mark Z. Danielewski
Pantheon Books, 2000.

No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

There’s a funhouse along the Ocean City Boardwalk called “The Pirate’s Cove.” I’m not sure how old it is, but it certainly looks ancient. The moment I step past its shabby parrots and faded treasure chests and enter its haunted interior, I feel as if I’ve stepped into another world, some timeless place where childhood fears and an adult sense of irony share a queasy coexistence. Here is a labyrinth of frights and illusions familiar to myself and probably my grandfather’s grandfather—mirrors of warped glass, hallways that rotate disorientingly, unstable floors that rock and tilt. And of course the dread dioramas; frozen tableaus of horror all the more evil for their dusty seediness, as if the adult in me senses the questionable intent behind the hands that crafted their black-light bones and blood-spattered walls; nameless hands, surely long dead; hands disturbed by the desire to introduce children to a world of torture and cannibalism.

Halfway through the Pirate’s Cove the dim lights extinguish completely, and you find yourself at the beginning of a dark corridor. The first time I visited The Pirate’s Cove was during the off-season, and I was alone. Thinking that the corridor would quickly lead to illumination, and perhaps another cheap thrill, I entered it without hesitation. But after a few tricky turns, I found myself in total blackness, and suddenly there was no corridor, no walls; just a curving iron rail, slightly too low for comfort. I discovered that I was in the center of a spiraling maze. Truth be told, I was suddenly terrified. I couldn’t believe they were still allowed to do this. Someone could panic, maybe get hurt. Nervously I moved ahead, blindly following the twisting rail. What if they had placed another tilting floor ahead of me? What if the rail suddenly vanished and I were left in empty space? And, of course: What if I were not alone? The thought of a masked carny lurking at the end of the maze, or even some punk kid who got the bright idea to stay behind and mess with people? Or you know, maybe something worse…? I mean, this is a Boardwalk carnival; it doesn’t exactly radiate wholesomeness. Finally I made it out of the maze, but for just a few moments, for a few exhilarating moments, I was close to actual panic. And you know what? It was worth every penny of my two-dollar ticket.

I don’t know much about Mark Z. Danielewski, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he had a collection of tickets from his favorite funhouses. Or, more to the point, if he were that masked carny I was so sure was lurking in the maze, biding his time to snatch at my ankle. Or maybe he would just jump up and thrust a copy of his debut novel into my hands, laughing like Zampanò as he slipped back into the dark.

Which brings me, finally, to House of Leaves. Imagine, if you will, The Blair Witch Project as a book, written by this masked carny—a very erudite masked carny!—after bingeing on Borges’ Ficciones and Nabokov’s Pale Fire. And imagine if the “witch” haunting the work were really a materialization of dread, a disorientation slowly blooming from the 3 a.m. corners of your bedroom, feeding on your doubts and fears during the insomniac hours before dawn. All the carefully constructed meanings you’ve created in your life seem under invasion by an encroaching emptiness, winding its way closer to your center as you wonder, increasingly nearer to panic, “Is this just me?” There is a lurker at the threshold, and whether it’s your own personal emptiness, a shared void common to all, or Lovecraft’s Yog Sothoth, is perhaps just a matter of perspective.

That a review of House of Leaves should start off with metaphors and comparisons is not to take away from its breathless sense of invention. It is big, bold, beautiful and arrogant; and a near-reckless energy hums from every page—in short, the exact kind of book destined to become a cult classic. This is a book that invites comparisons, a vast bibliovore swallowing its predecessors and digesting them in its rumbling bowels, using influence as fuel, reference as bloodstream, and intertextuality as a skeletal system. It is insufferably postmodern, maddeningly hip, and utterly in love with itself; and like a boardwalk funhouse, it’s filled with shameless tricks, distorted mirrors, and not a few genuine shocks. Mark Z. Danielewski has produced one hell of an ambitious first novel; and one that succeeds on a surprising number of levels.

Any account of House of Leaves must certainly deal with the unique structure of the book—indeed, part of the pleasure of reviewing the novel lies in the simple desire to describe it. House of Leaves has many layers, and like the film The Blair Witch Project, or Borges’ “Encyclopedia of Tlön,” it comes pre-packaged with its own fictional mythology. The book purports to be the revised “second edition” of an earlier version, originally loosely bound and passed along an Internet-savvy counterculture. The edition you are now reading has been “professionally edited,” binding together the work of two “authors,” the late Zampanò and his accidental protégé, Johnny Truant.

The bulk of the novel is Zampanò’s critical explication of a fictional documentary film. Called The Navidson Record, the film was made by Will Navidson, who one day discovers that his house has more space on the inside than it does on the outside. His curiosity engaged, he begins to probe this contradiction, but the more tools he brings to his exploration, the more willfully impossible the house becomes. Finally a new door appears, behind which lies a black corridor into another dimension. Calling upon the help of friends and relations, Navidson begins documenting his explorations using film, video, and audio tape; and as the corridor unfolds into an entire labyrinth, his life is changed forever. The Navidson Recordis the product of his explorations, a professionally edited chronicle of the house and its effects on himself and his family.

Like Danielewski’s novel, Zampanò’s book about The Navidson Record is also called House of Leaves, a self-professed masterpiece of inflated academic pomposity, riddled with personal observations, obscure reference material, and countless footnotes. Most, but not all, of these footnotes are apocryphal, reminiscent of David Foster Wallace and of course Borges. In fact, Zampanò himself is a thinly veiled Borges figure, like Umberto Eco’s Jorge of Burgos from The Name of the Rose or Gabriel García Márquez’ Melquíades from One Hundred Years of Solitude. Zampanò is old and blind, writes lonely poetry, has a penchant for languages, and, like the fictional Borges of “The Aleph,” counts a “Béatrice” among the great loves of his life. Also like Borges, he is fond of mixing authentic and fictional sources in order to provide an academic veneer to his work. (Or is that Danielewski and not Zampanò?)

These notations often veer into the realm of the surreal or the encyclopedic. In the chapter informally known as “The Labyrinth,” footnotes entwine around the text like twisting worms of pure data, catalogues so comprehensive as to approach an unreadable Joycean Gigantism. The text itself often mirrors the narrative events, looping into spirals, crossing up and down pages, or unfolding word by word across a dozen near-blank pages. Wordplay and textual games abound—even the word “house” appears consistently in blue type, as if to evoke the multi-dimensional topography of a hyperlink. Again Borges comes to mind, with a line from “The Garden of Forking Paths”—“no one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same.” Danielewski makes this notion perfectly explicit: the book is the labyrinth, a textual reflection of the warped interior of the Navidson House, which itself may reflect the subterranean twists of our (collective?) unconscious.

As Zampanò relates the events occurring in The Navidson Record—which is apparently a world-wide phenomenon, generating nearly as much scholarship and populist commentary as would a Finnegans Wake written by Stephen King—we as readers are allowed access to the primary story, that of the Navidsons and their eerie home. Herein lies the basic narrative tension of the book. Frame by frame, Zampanò leads us through the film as if we were watching it, and the Navidson family becomes quite real. Despite the constant chatter of often-conflicting secondary commentary, Will and Karen Navidson emerge as very well-drawn characters who easily gain our sympathy.

Will Navidson, a photojournalist accustomed to the suffering hot-zones of the world, becomes obsessed with the labyrinth folded into his own home. His urge to explore and document this dark abyss is directly counter to his wife’s wishes. Karen Navidson has the safety of their children and the very well-being of their relationship in mind. Her choice is simple: get the hell out of there. As a reader, we are pulled between these two equally compelling poles, and as Danielewski moves them farther apart, the stress on the Navidsons becomes as dark, scary, and consuming as the house below—or perhaps, as dark, scary and consuming as the widening spaces in any relationship. It is here that Danielewski produces his best characterizations, moving his tortured family through complex emotional states that ring true—this, one feels, is how real people might very well react to such an extraordinary situation. Although reconciliation is as powerful a theme as alienation, and our attention is constantly beggared away by Zampanò’s commentary, Danielewski does a credible job of building suspense through the textual chaos. The ending of the film will (theoretically) reveal what happens to the Navidsons, and we keep frantically turning the pages to discover their fate.

Zampanò’s work was left uncompleted by his mysterious death; which is an ingenious device for introducing a third stratum of narration, that of Johnny Truant. Brought to Zampanò’s death-room by a friend, Truant is amazed at the hermit’s collection of weird antiques, his mania for isolation, and his apparently terrifying end: Zampanò was discovered on the floor, with deep claw marks gouged into the surrounding wood. Also of interest is a large trunk, where Truant finds the manuscript fragments of House of Leaves scrawled across reams of paper, envelopes, matchbooks, napkins, and anything else Zampanò could press into service. Intrigued, Truant naturally becomes obsessed with the project, and begins the tedious process of assembling the fragments into a coherent work. As he goes about this self-appointed task, Truant adds his own layer of footnotes; perhaps better described as intensely personal digressions.

These long passages tell Truant’s story, a parallel tale of alienation, creeping madness, and the corrosive doubt he feels about the Zampanò manuscript itself—in Truant’s universe, as in ours, there has never been a film called The Navidson Record! Through his reflections on Zampanò’s work, questions emerge regarding the old man, the project, and Truant himself. Why did Zampanò, a blind man, invent of all things a film? And why write a book about an imaginary documentary? If the house was a metaphor for Zampanò’s hollowness, why did he project it vicariously on a fictional family? And of course: What happened to Zampanò, and will the same thing happen to Johnny Truant?

Whereas the Navidsons may or may not be fictional, and Zampanò remains an enigma, Truant’s story provides the most accessible narrative thread for the reader. Quite different from Danielewski’s other, “internal” characters, Truant feels like a stand-in for Danielewski himself—or at least, he seems like the kind of guy you’d see reading House of Leaves on the subway. Apprenticed to a tattoo artist in L.A., he’s a hip yet ultimately pathetic figure, drifting through an unfocused world of sex, drugs, and the emptiness that follows overindulgence in both. The only child of a marriage filled with tragedy, his overbearing mother languishes in an insane asylum, alternating between periods of madness and hyper-lucidity. (Her story—told in a series of letters from the asylum—is one of the highlights of the novel.) World-traveled and world-weary, Truant seems genuinely disenchanted with life, but is too ironically self-aware to fall into a clinical depression.

Despite the comparative realism of Truant as a character, Danielewski sometimes struggles to balance Truant’s intelligence and erudition with his streetwise persona. These sections can feel labored, as if Danielewski is unsure how “cool” Truant is allowed to be, especially during his sexual escapades. But once Truant begins probing his deeper fears and anxieties, not to mention his hallucinations, his words acquire a believable urgency, conjuring a chilling image of a young man descending into his own dark labyrinth. Driven by his obsession with Zampanò and the house, Truant is headed for a crisis in every sphere of his life—moral, intellectual, and social; even his health is imperiled. That Truant is aware of the danger is not enough to halt this downward spiral. Whether Truant is more sensitive to the existential dread that haunts us all, is genetically predestined for madness, or is simply too immature to take responsibility for his life are questions that Danielewski leaves unresolved, a central ambiguity that denies the reader an easy answer.

House of Leaves is essentially a horror novel; but it’s less about things that go bump in the night than about the night itself—the terror of emptiness, the threat of yawning gulfs, the horror of ambiguities. Like H.P. Lovecraft with his alien creatures abstracted even further into modernist anxieties, House of Leaves suggests that our efforts to catalogue and quantify the universe are parlor tricks played by the anxious mind, fabrications to distract us from the void at the heart of our being and from the chaos at the borders of our consciousness. It is a bleak message; yet Danielewski delivers it with great style, delicious humor, and remarkable inventiveness. It’s worth every penny of the ticket.

Additional Information

House of Leaves
You can purchase Danielewski’s book at Amazon.com.

Mark Z. Danielewski Homepage
The author maintains a Web site with numerous links to his work.

Author: Allen B. Ruch
Original Upload: 24 October 2000
Last Modified: 7 September 2024
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