Book Review: House of Leaves

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

I’d heard about this book for years as being a unique book that was dark and trippy. It’s been compared to Lovecraft, which is the name people always dredge up when they want to say “horror, but literary.” The only thing I knew about the plot was that it was about a weird house where the inside was bigger than the outside.

This book has two stories, one about a mysterious house and one about a feckless dude who has a psychotic episode after finding and obsessing over the unpublished manuscript of a book about a couple who discover that there’s some kind of interdimensional portal inside the aforementioned house. So the guy who finds the book, Johnny, mostly writes his own story within the footnotes of the manuscript about the couple (Navy and Karen) with the Tardis house. They use different fonts for the different storylines.

I liked the conceit of containing a secondary story within the footnotes. In general, I like footnotes, such as Terry Pratchett’s famous use of footnotes to make the story richer. The layout of the book was clever. I did like how the numerous footnotes included citations, which lent it verisimilitude. As the story goes along, the author adds in more formatting conceits, such as having blocks of text that are backwards on the opposite page, as if the paper is translucent, or having pages that are mostly blank except for a single sentence at an angle, to exemplify the non-Euclidian space inside Navy and Karen’s house. Some of these unusual formatting techniques reminded me of restaurants that put a big piece of curly kale on your plate; it’s pretty, but you can’t eat it. (footnote: curly kale is not edible. Fight me.) Later on in the book, there’s pages of poems, some of which are in other languages, and I felt like I was being put on. Like, why am I struggling through this boring text if it’s not furthering the plot?

I liked Johnny Truant’s story; it made me feel like I was transported to a mythical time where you could have an entry-level job at a retail establishment and still be able to afford your own apartment in Southern California. There were some weaknesses in the story, namely how it ended. This copy included a sheaf of letters from his mother, but having them all at the end didn’t really help, because I was at that point just reading to figure out what the heck happened. Also, he had the pendant she bequeathed him when he was backpacking in Europe, but she wrote to him about knowing that he was in Europe, so that’s an editorial miss. Also, her “story” just seemed to indicate that she was over-educated and under-medicated. Psychotic+loving mother who has no life outside of her son doesn’t really make for a fascinating character arc.

I was not satisfied with how Truant’s story ended. It just kind of fizzled for me. It ended with a parable that was too ambiguous for my taste. After struggling through deeply pedantic, navel-gazing passages discussing the history of the myth of Echo, and epigraphs in multiple languages that seemed to add very little to the story, I felt like I had earned a more satisfying resolution than “I guess it’s all over then, for some reason.” This is especially true because of an earlier incident where Truant was an unreliable narrator, ie. “this happened” and then “ha ha, no it didn’t.” His obvious affection for his friend Lude and his crush on the unnamed stripper he calls Thumper made him seem like a decent dude who was just going through some stuff, but I wanted a more solid resolution, like “and that was years ago and I have a job now and I’m on medication so none of that will happen again.”

The story with Navy and Karen’s house felt like it took place much earlier; it had an early 20th century vibe to it. I think it’s because of the way Karen seemed so unimportant to the exploration, like she sat around wringing her pretty hands effectively while Navy went off and did whatever he felt like. We have far more information about Navy’s directorial choices than we do about what exactly Karen does all day.

The Tardis-house story was pretty much the heart of the entire book, and while its ending was a little more satisfying than Truant’s, there were some parts of it that didn’t make a lot of sense, even beyond the “how is it bigger on the inside than the outside” notion. Like the scene in which Alice goes through the window. The orientation of the house made a huge impact on the characters in that scene, but I didn’t have a good sense of it and can’t picture what happened to Tom. And why would any member of the family go back in if something that tragic happened? It’s not like they had nowhere else to live. The ending with Karen and Navy also seemed a bit deus ex machina.

When I think about this book, I think about a beautiful piece of cake that is decorated with gold leaf, and whenever people talk about the cake all they say is “wow, it has gold leaf on it!” but the cake is a little dry and not as sweet as expected. It was so much work to winkle the story out of the excessive chaff of the pages and pages of nonsense. I don’t think I’ll remember the stories; I’ll only remember the layout, and getting to the end of the book, trying to remember enough French to translate a paragraph and asking myself “why am I reading this?” The weird formatting was clever, but the cleverness kinda got in the way after a while. It was a pretty good story, but not better than “pretty good.”



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