Back to School Reading: House of Leaves

I don't really go back to school anymore, although having done so for approximately fifty years, I still tend to think of September as the beginning of a new year -- the school year. So this year as things have been gearing up around me, with colleagues at work and some of their offspring turning attention to a new fall semester, I've gotten into the spirit by picking up what I like to think of as my new back-to-school reading assignment.

I've known about Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves for a few years. And while I had so far avoided being drawn into the cult of admirers, I was interested in the phenomenon it had created. Then a while back I actually bought a copy just to look at. If you haven't seen this book, you should at least take a look at it. It's pretty interesting just as an artifact of bookmaking. And, in fact, that aspect of the book is one of its more compelling features. But the narrative is also very postmodern, as they say these days. There are several levels of narrative and plot, with various disparate narrative voices.

In some respects I'm looking on this as more or less assigned reading. It came up in response to my work -- which I never discuss here, but suffice to say it's an unusual job and a perfect fit for someone with my particular qualifications. I probably would have read this book eventually anyway, just from curiosity, but I'm glad my work has given me the extra push to look into it now. If you know the book at all, I think you'll get what I mean.

Basically, the story is about an old guy, Zampanò, who dies and leaves behind a manuscript, The Navidson Record, which is a more or less scholarly study of a mysterious movie made by a photographer who, along with his partner and childern, moves into an old house the internal dimensions and layout of which they come to discover do not appear to be possible based on its external dimensions and appearance. The film records some strange happenings in the house involving the photographer, Will Navidson, and his family and friends.

The Navidson Record is introduced by Johnny Truant, a somewhat drug-crazed denizen of Los Angeles who, along with his hairdresser friend, finds the old man and the manuscript he's left behind. In the process of trying to get the manuscript published, Truant writes his own rambling introduction and sometimes intrusive and voluminous notes, thus adding another layer of interpretation and perhaps distortion to the story. Eventually, by a tortuous process of accretion and interpolation the manuscript grows into an enormous narrative puzzle, filled with Zampanò's interpretation of the Navidson film and his learned footnotes, Truant's rambling footnotes, and a maze of allusions, interpolations, and insertions, plus several appendices supplied by someone identified as "the Editors."

That should be enough for now. The story is pretty standard horror story fare: a seemingly normal family confronts supernatural stuff: unexplained phenomena, distortions in space and time and character. Any one or all of those involved could be either insane, drug addled, or just perpetrators of some elaborate hoax, or some combination of any or all of the above. It's definitely entertaining, and challenging in the way such literary puzzles can be. John Barth used to like to play these narrative games, e.g. Giles Goat-Boy. I'm not recommending House of Leaves necessarily, but I am saying I can understand the attraction. Now back to my research.