Book Review: House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski
Just finished reading this one, and while I did enjoy it (until the lacklustre end quarter) I'm not sure whether it's the wonderful postmodern literary classic it's held up to be or a bunch of intertwined stories which might have thrived a little better on their own and don't add up to much.
It's not necessarily the footnotes that I'm unsure of - they actually work quite well. (I especially enjoyed the chapter where the footnotes go completely insanse, crawling all over the page and nestling in the margins and bouncing the reader between themselves like a ping-pong ball; as efforts to turn a book into a maze go, it's kind of nifty, but I'm glad the schtick wasn't maintained for the rest of the novel.) I was more irked by how in some sections
Danielewski uses very few words per page
sometimes an entire paragraph
often merely a sentence
occasionally just a word
to create this odd kind of pacing. I don't know whether that pacing, fun as it is, is an effective literary technique or a cheap trick designed to cover the fact that his prose style is a bit clunky and isn't entirely suited to action sequences. I think on the whole the work could afford to be slimmer than it is by a few hundred pages - lose the letters Truant's mother from the lunatic asylum, since they really don't show any details that don't come out in Truant's rants, stop the silly spacing, trim back a few of the ludicrously long lists of references that Zampano indulges in, and drop the awful (and irrelevant) Pelican poems. Perhaps also drop some of Johnny's tales of sexual conquests, because they get kind of repetitive after the first few.
Also, the narration of the fourth expedition loses its impact due to the way it's narrated - first it's described from the point of view of the guys at the base camp, then you get a description of the mission itself and how it gets into trouble, then you get an account of the rescue mission (which overlaps a lot chronologically with the previous account), then you get an account of the guy the rescue mission left behind to keep contact with home, and then you get a narrative from home, and then you get another narrative from the rescue mission... and there's a large number of incidents that you end up reading through twice, without really getting much more information. This is, again, kind of boring and repetitive.
There's a bit where the author meditates on the meaning of boredom, so again this may not be intentional. But it's kind of a jerky thing to do. I can't help but picture Danielewski as being a very clever but terribly smug individual: the book's a real grab-bag of interesting and clever bits and silly tricks.
And sometimes he just makes bad decisions. The way the last expedition into the maze, in which Navidson goes in alone, is set up pretty much eliminates any chance of tension, because he tells us what the result of the expedition is going to be before it happens. He makes sure a chapter or two ahead that we are advised that after Navidson returns to the house that [SPOILER]Navidson gets out alive, the house becomes just a house again, and everyone feels much better about the whole experience[/SPOILER]. The expedition itself plays yet more silly spacing games with the text, and nothing much happens during it.
Conclusion: Stephen King doing a parody of postmodern art criticism is a schtick which could make an excellent short story. It can't make a really satisfying novel, especially when there is so little actual substance to get to grips with.
PS: Is it just me, or is the madcap bit where the walls start slamming into them and the guy falls down the suddenly-appearing pit seem a bit too violent, compared with everything else we see of the house's nature? The gear shift from brooding menace and haunting long corridors to mash-smash-bash-and-eat is jarring.
It's not necessarily the footnotes that I'm unsure of - they actually work quite well. (I especially enjoyed the chapter where the footnotes go completely insanse, crawling all over the page and nestling in the margins and bouncing the reader between themselves like a ping-pong ball; as efforts to turn a book into a maze go, it's kind of nifty, but I'm glad the schtick wasn't maintained for the rest of the novel.) I was more irked by how in some sections
Danielewski uses very few words per page
sometimes an entire paragraph
often merely a sentence
occasionally just a word
to create this odd kind of pacing. I don't know whether that pacing, fun as it is, is an effective literary technique or a cheap trick designed to cover the fact that his prose style is a bit clunky and isn't entirely suited to action sequences. I think on the whole the work could afford to be slimmer than it is by a few hundred pages - lose the letters Truant's mother from the lunatic asylum, since they really don't show any details that don't come out in Truant's rants, stop the silly spacing, trim back a few of the ludicrously long lists of references that Zampano indulges in, and drop the awful (and irrelevant) Pelican poems. Perhaps also drop some of Johnny's tales of sexual conquests, because they get kind of repetitive after the first few.
Also, the narration of the fourth expedition loses its impact due to the way it's narrated - first it's described from the point of view of the guys at the base camp, then you get a description of the mission itself and how it gets into trouble, then you get an account of the rescue mission (which overlaps a lot chronologically with the previous account), then you get an account of the guy the rescue mission left behind to keep contact with home, and then you get a narrative from home, and then you get another narrative from the rescue mission... and there's a large number of incidents that you end up reading through twice, without really getting much more information. This is, again, kind of boring and repetitive.
There's a bit where the author meditates on the meaning of boredom, so again this may not be intentional. But it's kind of a jerky thing to do. I can't help but picture Danielewski as being a very clever but terribly smug individual: the book's a real grab-bag of interesting and clever bits and silly tricks.
And sometimes he just makes bad decisions. The way the last expedition into the maze, in which Navidson goes in alone, is set up pretty much eliminates any chance of tension, because he tells us what the result of the expedition is going to be before it happens. He makes sure a chapter or two ahead that we are advised that after Navidson returns to the house that [SPOILER]Navidson gets out alive, the house becomes just a house again, and everyone feels much better about the whole experience[/SPOILER]. The expedition itself plays yet more silly spacing games with the text, and nothing much happens during it.
Conclusion: Stephen King doing a parody of postmodern art criticism is a schtick which could make an excellent short story. It can't make a really satisfying novel, especially when there is so little actual substance to get to grips with.
PS: Is it just me, or is the madcap bit where the walls start slamming into them and the guy falls down the suddenly-appearing pit seem a bit too violent, compared with everything else we see of the house's nature? The gear shift from brooding menace and haunting long corridors to mash-smash-bash-and-eat is jarring.
posted by Arthur at 12:29 AM
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