I've had Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves on my shelves (or in a pile of books in my room, at least) for years now. I think I bought it at The Strand on Broadway in New York while visiting with my sister and her now-husband.
It's a book that friends and even celebrities I admire have cited as among their favorite books. And it's one that I find conceptually fascinating. I'd even say I like it - I don't even want to give the impression that I'm finding it underwhelming after all the praise.
It's dense, though. I had to start it over after leaving it alone for years, and then even after picking it up again this year, it's felt like writer's block has a corollary called "reader's block" that has kept me from getting further in it until now.
The book was published in 2000, and I think there's some of that pre-9/11 world and tone that really resonates with me. While I'm roughly in the middle of the Millennial generation (skewing older) a lot of my taste, especially in music, skews more like a younger Gen-Xer. I discovered a love for alternative rock in 6th grade, and so a part of me will always feel most at home listening to music like Cake's The Distance or Smashing Pumpkins' Bullet with Butterfly Wings.
Johnny Truant, the character who, within the fiction of the book, gathered and edited the writings of the old blind man called Zampano, feels very much like the figures in the grungy alt/indie world. His world seems like the one David Fincher portrays in his adaptation of Fight Club, with rot and decay and young men with messed-up upbringings that have left them navigating a world of drugs and dysfunctional relationships with women.
The funny thing is that Johnny Truant could seem like a distraction. Zampanò (there's an accent, but I'm going to skip it because, you know, American keyboards) writes a somewhat pretentious academic treatise on a film called The Navidson Record that, Truant claims, doesn't actually exist. Truant never meets Zampano - he finds the scribbled manuscript within the man's apartment after he dies.
The film that the manuscript describes is a documentary in which famed photographer Will Navidson (famed in-story - he's fictional, and even might be fictional to Truant as well) and his family move into a house only to discover that there are impossible spaces held within - eventually with a mysterious door appearing in the living room that leads into an expansive labyrinth that physically cannot exit - the door ought to open out of an exterior wall, and yet people can pass through the space outside even as others enter the tenebrous hallway through the door.
There's a horror to all of this, but at least at the point I'm at, it's almost a "theoretical" horror. No explicit monster has reared its ugly head, but the sense of dread and foreboding is palpable.
Truant, ostensibly just an amateur editor, winds up feeling, to me, at least, like the book's main character. Even as Zampano interjects his essay with footnotes and editorial interpretations, Truant adds in commentary about his own life, though one is constantly invited to ponder just how truthful he's being. For one thing, he describes basically every woman he meets in very sexual terms, and seems to have sex with most of them, all while being a struggling tattoo technician who is clearly being driven mad by his connection to this story.
The part of the book that really struck me is an extensive appendix in which the letters Truant's mother sent him when he was a child from the mental institution to which she was committed appear. The erudition of the letters reminded me of my own mother, whom I lost in 2017 to cancer, though the letters also reveal to us that her reason for being there in the first place was a psychotic episode in which she tried to kill Johnny as a child. (Something my mother certainly never did.)
The book really makes use of its medium: being what is ostensibly an aspirational academic paper, it's filled with footnotes (which is where we get almost all of Truant's parts of the story). Not entirely unlike Susanna Clarke's fantastic 2004 novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, the footnotes are fully part of the story and experience of reading the book.
But I also think that the footnotes manage to place the reader in their own kind of labyrinth. Pages can go by as you read Johnny Truant's latest contribution (sometimes fully surreal and poetic to the point of incomprehensibility) and forget that you're actually reading the footnote to one of Zampano's footnotes and you have to go back to whatever fake academic paper the guy's quoting.
Now about a hundred pages in (the book's almost 700 pages,) the previously-established orderliness of those citations is breaking down. In an area marked with red ink (we'll get into that in a moment,) the footnotes start coming out of order, where you might see 124 followed by 127 and then 125. It almost feels like a threshold has been crossed, a barrier has been broken, and that some chaos has slipped into the narrative, which was already getting pretty freaky.
Throughout the book, the word House is always printed in blue (I'm reading the "Remastered Full Color Edition"). This actually extends to the cover of the book and even the rights page (it's published by Random House, and yes, that House is blue).
The meaning of that color is totally ambiguous to me, at least at this point, but now, in places where Zampano crossed out some of his writing, as if to say that he'd edit it out, it's in red (actually, in my own writing, when I want to preserve something I've written but intend to excise it from the following draft, I color it red in Microsoft Word).
This is a book I know has been an influence on some other works of art I've been fascinated by. Two years ago, I was introduced to the video games made by Remedy Entertainment, a Finnish game studio. Their games Alan Wake, Alan Wake II, and Control, all seem to have been influenced by this novel. The Alan Wake games are about a writer trying to survive a horror story that he's simultaneously writing, and Control, set within the same broader universe, takes place in a massive Brutalist office building that is very much like House of Leaves' House on Ash Tree Lane, except that it's also the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control, a secret paranormal-investigation agency of the U.S. Government.
I do appreciate, though, that the book seems to defy an obvious genre description. It could be considered horror (and I think plenty of people do so) but the formal elements of it make it hard to "sum up" in any generic way.
Anyway, I'm hoping I can keep up and actually finish it this time.
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