House of Cop-out

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

In principle, I should love House of Leaves, given that it’s a literary horror novel and also an experiment in using the printed word in a startling and unconventional way. Certainly, some of its imagery has proved haunting enough over the years to prompt me to give it another go recently, having forgotten most of what I disliked about it. This second reading has confirmed my impressions of the first: namely, that there’s a bunch of interesting experiments going on with it, and author Mark Z. Danielewski actually manages to keep them going for substantially longer than I’d have expected, but at the same time the ending is trite and irritating to the point of ruining the whole endeavour for me, and whilst it is an interesting puzzle it doesn’t quite feel worth the effort it takes to unpick it.

Like any good post-modernist, Danielewski has a distinct interest in texts and their interpretation and deconstruction, and House of Leaves presents a sort of multi-layered onion of texts (with a few associated pieces presented in the appendices). The core text the whole story surrounds is The Navidson Record, a film – purportedly a documentary – put together by Pulitzer-winning photojournalist Will Navidson and his partner Karen Green. The film chronicles the bizarre events that ensue when Will, Karen, and their two children move into a new home on Ash Tree Lane in a quiet region of Virginia; Will first becomes aware that something is up with their new home when he realises that the internal measurements exceed the externals by about half an inch, and once he calls in favours from his slacker brother Tom and his engineering professor friend Billy Reston even greater impossibilities arise: the disparity in the size of the interior rooms increases to at least a foot, a passageway spontaneously appears between Will and Karen’s room and the kids’ room, and a doorway appears in the living room which didn’t used to be there.

The living room door should lead to the outside – but the exterior wall on the opposite side shows nothing. In fact, beyond the living room door lies a vast, impossible, constantly shifting labyrinth of pitch-black featureless corridors – a labyrinth Will is determined to explore, and which Karen is absolutely terrified of. Roping in a team led by experienced explorer Holloway Roberts, Navidson and his allies undertake a series of expeditions which eventually lead to a horrendous disaster, but also turns out to be the key to the healing of Will and Karen’s relationship.

The thing about The Navidson Record, though, is that we don’t have access to it. Instead, the closest to the core of the matter we are allowed to get (and the second layer of the onion) is an extensive commentary on The Navidson Record written by a certain Zampanò, a blind author with a mysterious past and eccentric writing habits. Although Zampanò is clearly an erudite individual and he tries to present this material as academic critique, there’s a number of oddities which suggest that he doesn’t actually have much of a background in formal film studies. For one thing, he spends entirely too much time writing long descriptions of scenes from The Navidson Record to a level of detail unnecessary for a discussion of a real movie that’s available for people to reference in relation to a commentary but which is quite handy for us; on top of that, he goes way overboard on the footnotes, some of them lasting for pages and pages consisting of nothing but lists of names and places or other such ephemera. In addition, Zampanò seems to have written regularly about a minotaur theme in relation to Navidson’s labyrinth, but all of the discussions of the concept are crossed out, and at some points the layout of the text goes absolutely crazy – making shapes, changing orientation and margin spacing in a manner reminiscent of the contortions of the labyrinth currently being described, and generally pulling off a range of weird tricks.

Zampanò, however, died before he could compile his notes into a finished manuscript, and the task falls to a certain Johnny Truant, who along with his friend Lude was responsible for the discovery of Zampanò’s death and who ends up coming into the possession of a trunk full of Zampanò’s notes. Truant not only writes an introduction but also writes a number of footnotes himself, partly to note where he’s run into difficulties in reconstructing a section or to point out things which stand out about Zampanò’s account and partly to regale the reader with a range of incidents which occur to him during the process of reconstructing the book. As these progress it becomes apparent that Johnny’s life is running out of control – not that his self-proclaimed lifestyle of excessive intoxication, frankly unlikely casual sexual encounters, rampant partying and dead-end jobs partaken of in order to fund the above seems to have much stability in the first place, but weird maybe-hallucinatory maybe-supernatural manifestations, increasing paranoia, and an all-consuming obsession with the manuscript don’t exactly help matters.

Truant’s narrative constitutes a third layer to the narrative; a thin fourth one is provided by occasional interventions and annotations from the Editors, who seem to have taken responsibility for the final presentation of the material – which includes numerous appendices, some of material provided by Zampanò or Johnny, some of which have been provided apparently by the Editors to contradict some of Johnny’s assertions, like his insistence that some of Zampanò’s sources – not least amongst them being the Navidson Record film itself – do not exist. In addition, it seems hard to ascribe to anyone other than the Editors certain oddities of the printing that run throughout both Zampanò’s and Johnny’s material – for instance, in my edition the word “house” always appears in blue, whilst the term “Minotaur” and related discussion appears in red. And what about the way the pages of my edition extend beyond the front cover, so this House of Leaves, like the house on Ash Tree Lane, is larger on the inside than the outside?

This array of layers is clearly highly complex, but there’s a purposeful complexity to it. Danielewski has made it clear that he’s very interested in books as physical objects, and a lot of the crazy formatting and the runaway footnotes and the jumping back and forth between the main text and the appendices and the interrelations between concepts in House of Leaves play on that. Even the title is an allusion to a physical book; “leaves” in the “bits of plants where photosynthesis happens” sense don’t actually play any overt role in the book whatsoever. So far as I can tell, cooking up clever-clever ways to engage with the tactile experience of reading a printed book constitutes a major part of Danielewski’s creative process – his second novel, Only Revolutions, taking this to such extremes that it’s famed more for its obnoxious formatting tricks than it is for any of its actual content, a trap which House of Leaves doesn’t fall into because it doesn’t allow its fancy formatting to override the necessity to craft memorable scenes and images and incidents.

In particular, Danielewski is skilled at leveraging the two distinctive narrative voices in the book to get the best out of them. Zampanò’s tangents aside, his description of the film is so vivid that you can picture it perfectly, as well as bringing out the foibles of the various characters, and whilst in principle the commentary format might suggest he spends all his time telling and little time showing his analysis contains enough ambiguities, oblique sections and outright failures to comment on particular aspects that you can rapidly begin to have your own picture of The Navidson Record which stands apart from Zampanò’s own interpretation of it. At the same time, Zampanò’s writing is extremely impersonal and he doesn’t offer many details about himself, at least not overtly, and at least tries to present himself as an honest voice who doesn’t make any attempt to deliberately mislead the reader. Though he seems to be trying to cover up the Minotaur thing, this is mostly a matter of his personal interpretation of the Navidson Record – and since he is our only source for the Record‘s actual content we have to mostly take him at his word. Conversely, Johnny’s narrative is almost entirely about Johnny, and whilst other characters do exist in his narrative, they’re framed almost entirely in terms of Johnny’s interactions with them and wants and desires; whereas Zampanò is mostly absent from his narration, Johnny’s narration is a character study of himself.

In addition, by presenting the book as essentially a nested series of analyses about a text, you could argue that the novel press-gangs the very conversation surrounding it – the reviews, the analyses of its numerous secrets and codes and other easter eggs, the critique and the commentary – into being a fifth layer of the house. The actual book House of Leaves appears in the story at least twice – once in the Navidson Record when Will reads a copy in the labyrinth, and once in Johnny’s story, in which he finds a copy of the published book before he finishes editing it and notes how various readers have scrawled in it. Normally, I’d strongly dislike the idea of writing in a book, but I made an exception for my second read-through of House of Leaves, since it positively demands that the reader write in it. (For instance, all but one of the chapters lacks a chapter title, but the chapter titles are given in an appendix for you to write in yourself.) In this way the experience of reading it becomes an obsessive process, like Johnny and Zampanò’s writing and editing processes in microcosm.

Of course, the risk of that is that you end up scribbling angry rants in the book once it does something you really object to.

I’d seen warning signs coming up here and there along the way. Zampanò’s narrative mentions a little too regularly how striking and original The Navidson Record is and how distant it is from typical Hollywood horror fare, which comes across a little too much like Danielewski declaring how bold and original his literary horror novel is. (After all, a lot of the Johnny/Zampanò/Navidson stuff prompts us to wonder how much of the material in the book is really derived from a film made by Navidson, how much was made up by Zampanò, and how much was made up by Johnny, and whether Zampanò was just an invention of Johnny’s or Johnny was an invention of Zampanò, and all of that’s going to naturally nudge you to what is, in fact, the correct answer – they’re all fake and are inventions of Danielewski, who is solely responsible for anything and everything which is said in the book.) The narration goes so far as to provide a whole swathe of celebrities who’ve supposedly watched and commented on The Navidson Record (or the edited extracts that preceded its general release), which isn’t quite the same thing as making up quotes to put on the back cover blurb of your book because we know the quotes are fictitious, but still feels a lot like saying “were a film actually made with the imagery I have described here, it would be an absolute sensation”.

But for the most part I was willing to forgive this, because the story presented here did seem genuinely unique and did offer up a novel and fascinating horror concept and wrapped these all up in textual experiments that had little precedent (though there are some – off the top of the head I can think of the “typographic artwork” in Michael Moorcock’s The Black Corridor and the eccentric structure and presentation of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark). Unfortunately, having spun out the story for over 500 pages, Danielewski is left out on a limb, sabotaged by his failure to provide an ending as interesting as the preceding material. The scenario presented in the book is so unlike any conventional narrative that when you get a “love conquers all” ending in which Karen rescues Will from the depths of the labyrinth through the sheer power of her love for him it feels like a gargantuan cop-out.

Indeed, there’s this troubling thread running through the entirety of Karen’s side of the story: she’s defined entirely in terms of her relationship with Navidson, and whilst she has her own issues with the labyrinth and her own traumatic past at the same time these exist mostly to be obstacles to smooth and harmonious relations between Will and Karen. Meanwhile, women exist in Johnny’s story more or less exclusively for him to flirt with, have casual sex with, and obsess over; the major exception is his mother, who tried to kill him when he was very young and whose absence through most of his life has sorely affected him. Whilst I can accept gladly that Johnny is a weird dude whose lifestyle choices and attitudes aren’t necessarily meant to be endorsed by the narration, I find the matter of Will and Karen to be more of a problem, because whilst Johnny being kind of a shithead supports his narrative, Karen’s role as first an obstacle to Navidson’s determination to explore the labyrinth and subsequently the means of his salvation from it has a nasty, reductive effect on their narrative, taking apparently complex and nuanced interactions and the mysterious behaviour of the house and turning it into a long allegory about how women shouldn’t dump their loyal boyfriends because that would be mean and people shouldn’t be meanies.

Yes, of course, the earlier phases of the story are still there and present, but by concluding the story in the manner he does Danielewski points rather too directly to a particular solution, and in doing so can’t help but endorse it. (Indeed, he’s said very prominently in interviews that he considers the book a love story at heart, which further cements this interpretation, and to adopt another reading you pretty much have to ignore the ending of Navidson’s story.) He would have been better off either providing a solution just as shocking as the questions established in the text, or ducking back from providing an ending in the first place but simply having Zampanò’s analysis of the Record cease ten minutes short of the film’s ending. I am left with my vandalised copy of the book and mild regret at investing the time to read it twice.