"Zampano himself probably would of insisted on corrections and edits, he was his own harshest critic, but I've come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this a case a very old soul. A very old riddle."
When I started reading House of Leaves I would take pictures of quotes on my phone that stood out as really compelling to me. Eventually I stopped doing that. Much like Johnny I became deeply engrossed in the reading-- sometimes I found myself at 2 AM in the darkness of my own house. One day, with my wife gone on a business trip, I read such an amount that I felt it the next day at work. This was my final night of reading it. After it was complete, I sat with myself for a bit. Very few fiction books have ever really spoken to me. House of Leaves was the most astonishing story I ever read.
Much of the reading I have done on the book itself, led me to discover several people treating it variously as a joke between author and reader-- "ha ha, why did you bother with this thing? is it not so funny?"-- and as a puzzle to crack. These are not invalid readings but they're not what I am going to talk about. Rather, I want to talk about what reading this book meant for me. Not to speak of its contents in detail-- certainly I will have no footnotes nor will I give you page numbers. I am as always just going to talk about my feelings.
A house is many things. A house is also elementally a structure. Four walls and a roof and a door and windows etc. It keeps things out, it keeps things in. It is a shape. It can be a fortress. It can be a cage. Structures can give order to the world or they can take it away-- in my own house, the door to my room opens in such a way that it prevents access to my closet. To access my closet I have to enter my room, close the door to my room behind me (completely close it-- it can't even be a little open) and then I can comfortably enter my closet. Sometimes I am trying to get something from my closet to give to my wife. She has to either stand in the room with me, behind me, or stand in the hall, outside my room, and wait for me to be done with the closet so she can come in. You see, just as the room door blocks the closet door, of course, the closet door when open blocks the room door. My house keeps the elements out, gives me an address, makes me respectable and safe in the world-- it is also a little bit annoying. A little bit maddening you might venture to say.
Both a house and a book possess structure, elementally. A book's four walls and its accoutrements are things as complicated as language and seemingly as simple as how the paragraphs are blocked out on a page. It's pacing-- not just the narrative pacing but the pacing of the text. Once upon a time I read The Da Vinci Code-- a book I found completely risible and boring, but it too had structural details. Very short chapters, with very short paragraphs. If every chapter in a book is two pages and every paragraph is one sentence, it feels like you're running from place to place. If, like in Madiha S's "Unjust Depths" those paragraphs are sometimes broken up heavily and varying long-short to short-long and the chapters are 20,000 words long of that kind of nonsense it can feel like a sort of mania unfolding in front of you. Reading an entire thing in extremely center-oriented text, which House of Leaves makes you do several times, is also disorienting. But the book does even more than that. The book is a depiction of its world in a very literal sense. You see the state of the house on ash tree lane in the layout of text on those pages. It's a work of structural art. If I can be permitted a bit of arrogant self-insertion into the text of this blog post beyond the third person-- it felt vindicating to read this book because the author so understands how "laying out text atypically" is an art itself.
It's not just that the text contains a message, the story, which is encrypted in the text-- the story, the experience of fiction, is also encrypted in the form of the text. If you-- if you terminate your thoughts as-- as frequently-- as I do then it is-- well-- it is possible to reflect that in text. While it is possible to read that sentence without its punctuation, it conveys something different than if the punctuation were not to have existed. In the same way, we ourselves, our contexts, our structures, insist upon ourselves. Fundamentally, the stories we will tell ourselves are different because the structures we use to tell them are different. House of Leaves is a book about storytelling, to me. It's a book about structure, both literally and metaphorically, and the fact that our lives, our stories, and the stories that well, are also in themselves a structure. They're the context in which we can live, die, create, destroy, change. Ourselves and each other. I could look at the narrative told in the story, and it is a narrative I enjoy-- I could say it is a story about a house. I could talk about the characters, which I found endearing and damningly relatable at times. I could talk about how I'm a mentally ill and queer writer struggling to write fiction, with an uncomfortable possibility that I could not only fail to complete any of my stories, but die alone and a madwoman for my obsession with writing.
I think you should read an expensive physical copy of this book so you can manipulate it and then you can make of its characters what you will. Rather, what I felt about this book, at first, was a sense of despair-- the idea that someone had already explored a lot of the territory I set out to in fiction, that they had already dealt such powerful blows to the idea that stories need neat paragraphs and perfect grammar and relatable, comprehensible writing from unique-yet-not-too-political protagonists and characters. However, in further thinking about my feelings on the book, I shed my envious despair-- my house and the minotaur that haunts me are completely different than those which inspired the creation of this work, which, for all its beauty, does strongly represent the perspectives of its author still, and not "mine." Even here, I can say, with the arrogance and vanity that has always driven me, "I would do it differently." So I take away from the book the extraordinary achievement in style which it represents, and I will continue to throw down planks on my own madness into my own uncertain future. Carrying with me the weapons which this book has lent me, and hoping to deliver the madness of whim which it has given me onto others. Fuck the Chicago Manual of Style.
Anyway the book is peak. Kino even. 11/10.