House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
The novel
House of Leaves is an intricate series of nested narrative voices funneling all the way down to the book's deepest foundation, anchored in its setting, a setting which itself may be sentient.
The setting lies--at least initially--miles beneath the eponymous House of Leaves, after the house spontaneously generates an extra-dimensional addition featuring a tangle of improbably long and shifting hallways winding through a maze of empty rooms and side hallways and leading into a massive antechamber looming hundreds of feet high and stretching more than a mile from wall to wall. At the center of this great room lies a downward spiraling staircase opening more than 200 feet across, heading down an estimated 13 miles before it finally bottoms out.
The ceiling, the walls, the floors and the stairs in this space are all made from the same dark unknown material, and they are all completely unadorned. The space is pitch black, there is no furniture and there are no decorations here, nor are there any fixtures beyond the necessary doorknobs, hinges and doorjambs for the doors; there's none of the other infrastructure that you'd find inside of a normal house, just the plainest walls, ceiling, floor, doors and stairs, all of which periodically shift around in size and orientation, making the space difficult to navigate without specialized equipment. Compasses are useless inside of the space. One group of explorers brings in miles of fishing line and hundreds of neon arrow stickers for tracking where they've been, but these tools start to decay within days and are nearly gone within a week.
The temperature throughout the space sits right around 32°F (0°C), plus or minus a few degrees. No breezes or drafts play within the space. It appears that no one lives here, although occasionally a horrible low growl tears its way through the rooms and hallways.
The next level of narrative in the story concerns the visitors to the space. Normally the characters and the setting work on the same narrative level, because the characters in stories are generally forced to interact with the setting as it is. Not so in this case, because the space beneath the house changes according to who is visiting it and what their mindset may be. As an example, after the first explorers establish that the staircase has a bottom--however improbably far below--the crew sent to rescue them after they disappear reaches the bottom of the staircase after only 100 feet, rather than the original 13 miles, apparently having vastly foreshortened the spiral staircase by virtue of being informed by the prior (and now lost) crew that it is not infinite.
The next level of narrative is known as The Navidson Record, being the name of the documentary film detailing what happens to the visitors to the space. This film exists on a narrative level above the character's experiences because--thanks to production values and selective editing--a documentary of a thing is not the thing itself.
Will Navidson, the producer, director and editor of The Navidson Record, is an award-winning combat photographer and a journalist who owns the house wherein the space manifests itself. His accomplished filmmaking skills, along with his temperament, his shaky and complex relationships with his high-maintenance fashion model wife, his kind-hearted ne'er-do-well twin brother, his young kids and the other explorers of the space are all brought under the baleful gaze of scores of experts and pundits, who report their observations within the copious footnotes that half-fill the book, playing out reams of commentary hailing from every field imaginable.
It's those experts and reviewers who form the next layer of narrative, and it makes sense that a documentary about a purportedly real house that is medium-sized on the outside but encloses many, many square miles on the inside would attract a ton of critical and scholarly attention.
The next level up from the experts and pundits is a solitary old blind man named Zampanò. With the help of a rotating troop of sighted female volunteers from various local community centers, Zampanò has collected all of the footnotes dealing with The Navidson Record documentary, and he has woven a review around them, one that takes up a major share of the book, as he also seems bound to tell the full story of the house and the space underneath, along with the fate of the characters and the film that Navidson has made about them. Zampanò is basically the compiler of all the narrative levels below him.
At present I'm less than halfway through this book, so I can't say for sure if Zampanò will give us a complete summary of everything he knows about the story from beginning to end, but it sure looks like he will. At one point during his near-obsessive compiling, one of his volunteer helpers chides him for giving the full plot summary of the movie, telling him that he's supposed to be writing a review, not a freshman book report.
That jab hit a little close to home, after I found myself guilty of doing the same thing in my Dostoevsky reviews, so after I ran across it, I decided to post my
House of Leaves review while I still have only half the book finished.
Now we make a leap up to the next level of narrative and into the
world of Johnny Truant. Johnny's long self-introduction gives us the skinny on the old blind man Zampanò, in that he has recently died--ostensibly from natural causes, though there are some disturbingly deep and unexplained scratches in the hardwood floor next to Zampanò's corpse--and Zampanò has left all of his writings and footnotes scattered across the bottom of a trunk in his bedroom, comprising a huge trove of content, both typed and scrawled in longhand, on paper, across napkins, on envelopes and even across postage stamps, arranged in no particular order, all of which Johnny decides to take up and attempt to organize and compile.
Johnny's no scholar. He's young and kind of a dudebro, albeit a very troubled dudebro. As Johnny sets Zampanò's work down on fresh paper, and the story of the Navidson Record progresses on the levels below him, his mental health starts to deteriorate in a jarring melange of drug and alcohol abuse, a long string of one-night stands, and increasing panic attacks leading into agoraphobia and violent hallucinations.
Johnny writes his additional footnotes below Zampanò's own, adding his own extensive and unraveling personal story, all done out in Courier New font, whereas anything from Zampanò shows up in Times New Roman.
I have a history with Courier New. Everything I wrote in my 20's and 30's was in that font. That font was my jam. One night, 6 or 7 years ago, while in a blackout, I destroyed everything I'd written in Courier New by running my laptop under the kitchen sink. I still have some longhand material left; that survived the blackout purge, but all the longhand stuff is crap. The stuff that drowned under the sink was written later and was much better. To this day, reading anything in Courier tends to dredge up regrets.
The drowner of my laptop is the same Suited Blackout who locked the bathroom door on me a little while back, and who last year tossed my thick coke bottle glasses way down underneath my bed, which had me stumbling around my apartment for an hour, near-blind and cursing, wondering if I'd have to go out and search the yard on my hands and knees, wondering if he'd hucked them completely out of the back yard in a wide glittering arc, clearing even the adjacent property and flying into the next one, finally coming to earth with a juddering halt on the tan weed and gravelstrewn ground exactly halfway between a semi-cemented pile of pit bull scat and a scorpion-infested palm tree. I eventually did find my glasses under my bed, peacefully hanging out with the dust bunnies.
But enough about me, except that my digression kind of illustrates Johnny's writing style, which often starts with a short comment or a footnote about Zampanò and then leads into a long and very personal anecdote about Johnny.
As his
world crumbles around him, his formatting of the book becomes more chaotic, or it may be that Johnny is just faithfully duplicating the decline of Zampanò's scattered narrative. It's probably a little of both.
Another detail about Johnny: he cannot find any real
world evidence of The Navidson Record. It doesn't exist in his
world. Some of the pundits and critics in Zampanò's footnotes are real people from our
world, so Johnny tracks them down, and everyone who responds to him tells him that they've never heard of the Navidson Record or of the space below the house. Some of their footnotes are real in a sense, but all of the real notes refer to things other than the Navidson Record, but Zampanò has hijacked them for his book.
Johnny even tracks down--and has sex with--a few of Zampanò's sighted volunteer assistants, but they can't give him any answers, or it seems that he doesn't have the right questions, or mostly he's ensorcelled by their feminine charms and forgets to ask the things that he wanted to.
So yes, right at the beginning of the book Johnny tells us that Zampanò has constructed a fictional story about a space below a house, and the old man has decorated it with an obsessively elaborate nonfictional facade. I didn't tell you this until just now because you and I are moving through the story from the bottom up, and we couldn't know about Zampanò's fictions until we met up Johnny. Sorry about that.
Except it's not entirely clear cut when it comes to Johnny, who gives the impression that he's afraid Zampanò's story might bleeding into his
world and assisting with his own breakdown, though he never comes right out and says that--at least in the first half of the book. If this is the case then Johnny ought to be afraid, because some terrible things are happening on the staircase down below the house, and the situation down there is rapidly falling apart, much like Johnny himself and the formatting of his book.
Which brings us to The Editors, who sit at the next level of narrative up from Johnny, and who--as far as we can tell--make only some scattered and rather feeble corrections and translations, all in Bookman font; otherwise they let Johnny run pretty rampant with the text.
The Editors are not same as the author, because the former live in a
world where Johnny and Zampanò are real, whereas the author lives here in our
world with us, where all of the characters in the book can only exist in our heads--although some of the pundits and experts from the footnotes are real people, only they are in fact fictionalized versions of themselves.
The Editors may have some further role in the second half of the book, but from my limited viewpoint they exist only as a thin and penultimate layer of narrative between the author and Johnny Truant, although something nefarious could be inferred about them from the lack of explanation as to who they are and what their stake in the book might be.
At the last and highest level we have the author, Mark Z. Danielewski, the Final Boss and master architect behind this elaborate multistory narrative. In the spirit of the freshman book report I skimmed the following factoids about him from Wikipedia:
Danielewski worked on the book for 10 years, finishing it in 2000, then he submitted it to 32 publishers before it was finally picked up.
Before it was published, the author would leave handmade copies of the manuscript lying around in Las Vegas, San Francisco and Los Angeles strip clubs and recording studios, perhaps hoping that the right kind of people would read it and get the buzz going. He also serialized it online, but to protect it from piracy he set it up so that people could only download one page at a time, and back then, on turn of the century Internet, that had to be a real pain in the ass.
And these would be all of the narrative levels in
House of Leaves, except for one narrator whom I didn't cover because she's exclusively from the second half of the book. I'm not sure, but I think that she might live on a narrative level somewhere between The Editors and Johnny Truant. In any case, she doesn't show up until the second half, so you're going to have to look elsewhere if you want to learn her story.
Here are the narrative levels laid out from top to bottom.
Why so many levels? The short answer I think might be...because it's fun? The Multiple Narrative
Worlds construct is not an original one, and a number of film examples come to mind. There was the underrated Last Action Hero, where a movie star hero and his villain counterpart break out of their film and into the real
world of a young fan. Before that, there was The Purple Rose of Cairo, where the movie escapee is a romantic lead instead of an action hero. Then, in one of the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels Freddy breaks through the fourth wall and terrorizes the cast and crew of...a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel. Then there's Inception, which replaces narrative levels with dream levels. And of course there's the Matrix, along with its disappointing sequels.
I don't know for sure if Mark Z. Danielewski was trying to break his story out into the real
world, but his viral campaign of leaving manuscripts in weird underground gathering spots and in odd corners on the turn-of-the-century Internet seems to suggest it.
Around that same time, as you may recall, the filmmakers of The Blair Witch Project pulled off a viral marketing coup by naming the characters in the movie after their actors, then by hiding said actors away and implying that they'd disappeared, and that the actor's "found footage" was real.
I understand that Danielewski's aim with the book was likely more than just about having fun and doing some viral marketing. The author is a student and a fan of Jacques Derrida, a famous Deconstructionist philosopher. As for myself, I have a hard time understanding Deconstructionism beyond guessing they claim that the meaning of words and concepts is highly subjective and depends heavily upon context and culture--and that may explain something of the malleability of the space below the house vis-à-vis the large variance between Danielewski's narrators--but I don't care about any of that, so I'm sticking with the fun explanation, along with the idea that he wants to somehow break his story out into our
world.
EPILOGUE:
The author's sister, Annie Danielewski, aka Poe, happens to be my favorite female musician. Poe cut her only two albums, Hello (1995) and Haunted (2000), at the same time that Mark was writing House of Leaves, and the two siblings were inspired by and made references to each other's work in their own work.
My girlfriend back around then was Anna, the red-haired Mormon from my Nit-tastic tales. We always had Poe's two albums in constant rotation, and Anna would sing along with Poe, and my girl would sound like one of God's own hand-picked choir maidens.
Minutes after I wrote the paragraph above, an email from Anna popped into my inbox.
Before this, I hadn't heard from her in months, not since just after Suited Blackout recreated her one night as Fallout 4 character named Subby.
Before those two times, Anna and I had been out of touch for many years.
Last edited by suitedjustice; 02-10-2020 at 05:23 PM.