When I started House of Leaves--three weeks ago--expecting a horror story, and to be sure, there are scary parts, but the central plot is really a love story. There's also some mystery, history, mythology, and philosophy...but let me back up:
A family moves into a house which contains a hallway that is too big to fit into the house. Will Navidson, a Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist, and his partner, former model Karen Green, have moved to this house in a rural Virginia town with their two children to be together and work on their relationship. Unfortunately, the house comes between them, for awhile...
Navidson becomes obsessed with exploring, photographing, and filming the house, and enlists other professionals to help him. What follows would make a good horror flick. Meanwhile, the claustrophobic Karen wants nothing more than to pack up everything and get them all out of there.
The tale of this house, referred to as The Navidson Report, was the resulting film. House of Leaves is a commentary on The Navidson Report, written out in a very scholarly fashion by an older man we know only as Zampano, who dies before finishing it. Actually, his notes are a mess, and they are found (that's another story) by a young man named Johnny Truant (Johnny come lately?) who becomes just as obsessed with putting together this story as Navidson was about exploring the house. Oh, and another thing: Truant is never able to find any proof that The Navidson Report or any of the people involved, actually exist.
Down the rabbit hole we go: Zampano included many footnotes, so many that sometimes they will take over the page, especially when these footnotes have footnotes. Truant also footnotes some of Zampano's footnotes. Author Mark Danielewski must have had a lot of fun with this, sometimes attributing quotes about The Navidson Report to famous people, such as Stephen King. There is much humor, and his parody of academic commentary is quite well done.
Johnny Truant does more than add footnotes--something in Zampano's original text will set Truant off on tangents, during which we learn about the downward spiral of his life, which seems to echo a certain dark, downward spiral Navidson experiences. Truant is a most unreliable narrator, and whenever his voice took over, I was never sure what was real and what was nightmare.
But then, this entire novel is intentionally disorienting, and no review would be complete if it didn't mention the way much of the narration of Navidson's exploration of the house is literally disorienting.
conventions are reversed.
on the plot, when normal
to keep one's mind
Sometimes it's hard
Danielewski forces the reader to turn the book in all directions, read in different ways, and chase footnotes. I spent quite a bit of time on one page, decoding a letter from Johnny's mother. It wasn't hard to do, just a bit more demanding to read than my usual fare, and definitely a first in my fiction reading experience. And, by the way, the plot jumps around in the usual way, too.
I find this so mysterious, and have so many questions...and I find that I've added my own notes in the margins...
