Flak Magazine: Review of House of Leaves, 05-06-00

While the jaded, cultural elitist might call Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves" little more than a gimmick, it's easy to see a skilled scribe tugging on the book's strings. Strip away Danielewski's multiple typefaces, vertical footnotes and color text, and "House of Leaves" remains an original, gripping, frightening debut.

The book is a many-layered critique of The Navidson Record, a documentary film about a highly unusual house in an unnamed Virginia suburb. Inhabited by the family of prize-winning photographer Will Navidson, the humdrum house is supposed to provide the family a haven from Navidson's danger-filled shoots in the Third World. Somewhere the family can concentrate on being a family.

It's not surprising then that Navidson, who's been capturing things on film all his life, decides to make a light, fluff piece on his family's new home. It isn't long, though, before Navidson learns his house isn't entirely normal. Nor is it long before his innocent documentary about family life in the suburbs becomes something much darker.

When the family goes away on a weekend trip, they return to their home to find a door on a wall that didn't used to be there. What's more, the new space in the house means it is larger within than without. And when the size of the area behind the door begins to ebb and flow, Navidson realizes he's in over his head.

He brings in a crack team of explorers to venture into what has now become a labyrinth of epic proportions. In addition to the cameras set up inside the house, he arms the explorers with cameras and sends them in. And that's when disaster strikes.

But "House of Leaves" is much more than a simple, Blair Witch-style tale of an exploration gone awry. The narrator learns of the events documented in The Navidson Record through Zampanò, a blind man whose descriptions of the events in the film (a blind man describing a film?) are likely far more terrifying than the film itself.

Furthermore, Zampanò's text (and life) is encapsulated within the writings of Johnny Truant, a literate, down-on-his-luck drifter who stumbles across Zampanò's unpublished manuscript shortly after the old man's death. Truant takes it upon himself to finalize Zampanò's manuscript for publication. As he does, he adds his own footnotes to the mix, developing the same obsession with Navidson's house that likely killed Zampanò.

Add to these interwoven meta-narratives a chorus of footnotes and Editors' (the ones to whom Truant submitted the finished manuscript) comments, and the average "Harry Potter" reader is apt to be more than slightly confused.

What's more, "House of Leaves" isn't read like a conventional book. Borrowing some conventions from film (see Mark Z. Danielewski Interview), Danielewski uses the layout of his text to, among other things, pace his reader along with the novel's action.

But despite all of Danilewski's trickery, the book is deceptively simple to read compared to the difficult postmodern authors whose names (Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace) appear alongside Danielewski's in major national publications. Easing the reader in slowly, the book effectively teaches its readers how to read it. The different voices are easy enough to keep track of, as Danielewski uses a different typeface for each one, and the miles-thick layering of footnotes occurs far enough into the book where a patient, open-minded reader won't be daunted all that much, having already become used to Danielewski's style.

In many ways, reading "House of Leaves" is akin to what it must have been like when turntable owners in the '60s and '70s discovered they could play their Beatles, Electric Light Orchestra and Led Zeppelin Records backward. In addition to all of the author's dazzling typography, the book is filled with coded messages, many of which uses the first letters of words to spell out whole sentences.

The word "house" appears in blue throughout the book, and while Danielewski would not reveal his motives for using blue for "house," he was kind enough to offer that it has something to do with how blue is used in film. Knowing this, it's not much of a stretch to say that Navidson's house acts as a psychological "blue screen," meaning those who enter the maze effectively come into an empty structure on their own, with their psyches providing the background images and sound much the way Industrial Light and Magic provided the asteroid fields pummeling the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars: A New Hope.

Or maybe not.

The point here is that Danielewski has created a book that's something for everyone. For those seeking a truly frightening book, there's The Navidson Record. For those looking for a well-crafted tale of an aimless, wandering drifter, there's the story of Johnny Truant. Fans of clever, pomo annotation have the author's glee club of footnotes and occasional pokes at academia, and typographers will doubtless spend hours scanning the book's pages for clever ideas. There's even a mother-son drama and a love story that both play larger roles in the book than many critics have acknowledged. And Area 51 maniacs and ex-CIA men alike will relish the task of decoding all Danilewski's messages.

While at times the life of Johnny Truant lacks the dramatic punch of the corresponding events in the life of Navidson (and those alluded to in the life of Zampanò), it's hard to fault Danielewski for trying. Though it would seem as if the novel would benefit from an overall tightening (but by no means an elimination) of the Johnny Truant portions, Danielewski has still crafted an amazing novel. That he succeeded in this mammoth task at all makes his labyrinthine first novel a killer of a debut.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)