I recently finished reading House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. It’s a fascinating, complex book that had me alternately reading and spinning with thoughts about reading and writing and publishing and….
It’s one of those books that it took me awhile to get around to reading. I remember being shown a copy years ago by a member of a writers group I was in at the time. She showed me one of the many pages that look like this:
And I remember reacting to it purely on a technical layout and print process level. Wow. That looks hard to do. What I somehow completely missed was that it was a book about a haunted house, and about filmmaking, and about a marriage, and that I should certainly be very interested in reading it.
A couple of years ago, my wife bought me a copy for Christmas. This was a brave thing for her to do. She has, more than once, bought me a book that she had never heard me talk about, but thought I would be interested in, only to see me put it on a shelf and never take it down again. (So far, I emphasize, while acknowledging this trend does not reflect well on me.) Fortunately, for both of us, I had since learned more about House of Leaves and was very interested in reading it.
It still took me a while to tackle it for two reasons. 1. I have a long-standing aversion to reading big, long, dense books. My tastes generally run toward shorter, snappier stuff. I’ve been working to overcome this weakness. 2. House of Leaves is not a typical reading experience and I kept picking up more “normal” books instead of it.
Now that I’ve read it, I can say that it is a very honest book, from the cover on in. A few words on the cover art, first, because book covers are too often missed opportunities to extend the reader’s experience of the book. Too many are boring or bland or just outright bad. Not so here.
The front cover has a blank compass (no indication which direction North is) and a spot gloss printed labyrinth on the field of black. The cover doesn’t fit the book. Instead, it largely conceals another cover beneath which consists of a collage of drawings, bits of manuscript, shell casings, measuring tape, postage stamps, a broken compass, drops of blood, and more. All of which, of course, are contained within the pages. The spine portion of the cover looks like a row of those old Polaroid instant prints I remember waving around as a kid, waiting as the image coalesced from a swirl of murky colors into a clear shot. The arrangement also suggests a strip of film and the images themselves are ‘bad’ shots of houses. Slanted. Concealed. Upside down. All of it is appropriate and evocative of what lies within. The back cover is a black-and-white blurry photo of a man crouched with a lantern or flashlight. He is examining or writing on a wall. It could be from any number of scenes.
Heck, even the blurbs (always an element to examine with suspicion) turned out to be accurate, even when wordy and overblown. Example: Jonathan Lethem says, “This demonically brilliant book is impossible to ignore, put down, or persuasively conclude reading.” The last bit was what stuck out, because I had not seen it said about a book before.
And, it’s true. You enter a labyrinth when you begin reading House of Leaves. There are multiple narrators, some of whom are commenting on or editing the contributions of the others. There are footnotes, some of which consist of lists that go on for pages, and many of which spawn other footnotes. There are references to real people commenting on the events of the fictional story. There are references to related books, articles, and songs – not all of which exist. There are poems and letters and drawings and collages and even a stave of music.
As I read, I had to pay attention. Where is footnote #147 hidden? Do I need to read this whole list or is this a dead end and I need to backtrack and continue on the other path? And did I read every word contained in the book? No. Because some of them are in foreign languages and some of them are hidden in collages and I’ve heard there is even a code to break that unlocks still more of the book. So, yes, it is difficult to say that I “persuasively” concluded reading it.
Now, none of the above would be more than an intellectual exercise and a printer’s nightmare joy except that there is a story with characters I connected with and rooted for trapped within the labyrinth. Will and Karen and their two children move into a house. The house, Will discovers, is larger on the inside than the outside, an Escher house. And that’s just not ok. As one of the narrators notes,
“The impossible is one thing when considered as a purely intellectual conceit. After all, it is not so large a problem when one can puzzle over an Escher print and then close the book. It is quite another thing when one faces a physical reality the mind and body cannot accept.”
Then a hallway just…appears in a wall. It turns out to be the entrance to an impossible, impossibly large labyrinth that will consume the family in every sense. All of the very human flaws come out and must be confronted, if not overcome, and that, in the end, is what matters.
There’s also an often hilarious presentation of academic analysis of the fictional work, the characters, and the themes woven throughout.
I wrote all over the pages. My 8-year old was horrified and reprimanded me. But it seemed completely appropriate to me, given that there are swaths of the text struck out or declared missing and the other devices used to create the sense of assemblage and ongoing analysis of an unsolvable mystery.
I also wondered how effectively this could be presented as an ebook. It’s one thing to read and “turn” pages that neatly flow from one to the next. But, at more than one point in House of Leaves, you follow text printed only on part of the page for a dozen pages and then switch to a different part of the page and read backwards through the pages to where you started. And, perhaps more than many other books, the physicality of the object, of wrestling with it in your hands, is part of the experience. A book, unlike say my browser looking at this blog, typically contains a finite world. It has a last page – a bottom, if you will. Online, we can always click on the next link. We’re never really done. But House of Leaves challenges this assumption. Like the house itself, the book is bigger on the inside than the outside, and I’m left knowing there is more to discover.
So, if you’re looking for a book that evokes plenty of disturbing stories and films you may know while simulatneously turning them inward on themselves and presenting a challenging reading experience, I encourage you to step into House of Leaves. Just bring plenty of supplies and don’t expect you’ll necessarily find your way out.
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