Lit Notes: About 200 Pages Into House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski

This novel was recommended to me by a friend whose literary taste is impeccable (cannot be pecked at). Unfortunately, although I find the premise of the book extremely interesting and original, the overall experience of reading it has been far more irritating than enjoyable or illuminating, for reasons that will become clear below.

Note: This review’s credibility is seriously undermined by the fact that I don’t want to bother hunting down quotations from the book to support my various allegations. It also doesn't help that I haven't yet finished the book. But there it is.


What I Like About House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski

1) It’s ambitious as hell: a meta-meta narrative of a fictional documentary about a house that is not so much haunted as alive and totally alien and horrifying in nature.

2) It’s a (more) intelligent horror novel—a genre that doesn’t get enough attention from ‘serious’ writers (yes, I know it’s a slippery term. That’s why it’s in quotation marks).

3) The concept of the house is really original and uncanny.

4) The ways Johnny Truant, the second narrator, relates to/comments upon/digresses from the ‘manuscript’ that forms the body of the novel.

5) The layout* (a clever trope that almost immediately becomes a major stumbling block to enjoying the novel)

6) The letters from the crazy mom, in the appendix. Her voice is completely distinct from that of the other narrators, and extremely convincing, as are her tricky paranoid/delusional spirals and occasional moments of clarity.



What I Dislike About House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski

1) The author’s iffy grip on the English language (i.e. his tendency to change tense in the middle of a sentence, his failure to use commas half the time they are needed, his just flat-out wrong use of certain words…) is really annoying and distracting throughout. The fact that the main narrator, Zampano, is a fictional character doesn’t really excuse it, either, although it is a clever way for the author to distance himself from the text’s flaws. Johnny Truant, the second narrator, is of course supposed to be not-so-well-educated. The trouble is that Danielewski’s awkward control of the language is consistent in both narrators, making it pretty clear that the problem is his, not theirs.

2) The pages and pages of, for example, the names of buildings, which, while they (very obviously) make the point that Zampano is not all that stable/reliable of a narrator are ultimately just irritating and useless, not to mention a huge waste of paper.

3) The visual device of altering the layout in crazy ways (i.e. the “see through” boxes of footnotes, with the text on one side of the page and its mirror-image on the other) which I guess is supposed to put us in mind of the strange geometry of Navidson’s house, but which, again, is really just distracting and disruptive to the flow of the novel.

4) The excuse for all this, given by Johnny Truant in a footnote early in the book, that he has decided not to edit Zampano’s text, believing that the layout itself, the digressions, and the material Zampano crossed out is all potentially necessary and important.

5) The random bits of grad-student level theory (Hegel, Derrida, DeSaussure) strewn throughout the book, that succeed only in giving the reader the impression that Danielewski has spent some time in grad school, and no, the fictional narrator doesn’t get him out of that one, either.

6) The gratuitous and totally boring accounts of Johnny Truant’s sex life.

7) The fact that, by the middle of the book, the footnotes become so constant, and so intentionally disorganized (even the numbers are out of order) that any reader without a photographic memory starts getting lost and has to keep going back and rereading. The point here, obviously, is that you, the reader, are getting lost and turned around by the text just as Navidson and the explorers of the house get confused by the house itself. The trouble is that, instead of thinking “Wow, this narrative is branching and proliferating in just the same mindfucking way that the rooms in the Navidson house do!” , the reader just feels completely disconnected from the book and wonders why he is being asked to deal with this shit.

8) Danielewski’s tendency to explode at random into pseudo-poetic/metaphysical abstractions that are eerily reminiscent of my high school’s literary magazine.

9) The fact that basically everything about the book that makes it “serious literature” is ill-executed and off-balance. The whole thing could (and should) have been reduced to a very effective, 30 page short story: just Zampano’s description of The Navidson Record, minus all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit.

P.S. On the book jacket, Bret Easton Ellis envisions “Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, Stephen King and David Foster Wallace bowing at Danielewski’s feet, choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter, awe.” Ellis’ qualifications for making such a statement notwithstanding-- Pynchon?! David Foster Wallace?!? I really really really really really think not.