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For our second Book Review segment, we discuss Mark Z. Danielewski's debut novel, House of Leaves. Utilising all the literary devices that postmodernism has to offer, House of Leaves is an exceptional work of art; an absolute pleasure to read and talk about.
Two friends obsessed with books and writing, we're Shannen and Gareth, and welcome to The Pleasure of the Text Podcast. Reading and writing aren't lonely pursuits, and The Pleasure of the Text lies in the shared imaginative space where readers and writers make meaning together. So tune in and join us as we talk about the books we love, interview remarkable authors, and discuss the writer’s craft.
Shannen: Hello, hello everyone! And welcome to “The Pleasure Of The Text” podcast. We are your hosts; Shannen and Gareth.
Gareth: Hello Shannen, and we finally got there, we're doing “House of Leaves”. Very excited.
Shannen: I am so excited today. And here at “The Pleasure Of The Text” we're all about that shared imagine space of readers and writers making, uh, meeting together.
So today we are going to be talking about “House of Leaves”, like you said by Mark Z. Danielewski. So, uh, I we’re actually going to give a bit of background on Mark, so we're a bit more acquainted with the author before we jump into his work. And this is his debut novel. So, well for me, what an amazing debut novel it is.
So Mark Z. Danielewski was born in New York City and lives in Los Angeles. He's the author of the award-winning and bestselling novel, “House of Leaves”, National Book Award Finalists “Only Revolutions”, and the novella; “The Fifty Year Sword”, which was performed in Halloween, three years in a road at Red Cat.
So his books had been translated into multiple languages, and his work has been the focus of university classes and literary events. So in 2015, Mark Z. Danielewski’s “Thrown”, a reflection on Matthew Barney's “CREMASTER 2” was displayed to the Guggenheim Museum during its storylines exhibition. Between 2015 and 2017, Pantheon released five volumes of “The Familiar”, each an 880-page instalment about a 12-year-old girl who finds a kitten and sets off a chain reaction with global consequences.
With the release of the series, The New York Times declared Mark Z. Danielewski America's foremost literary magus. His latest release - is it magus?
Gareth: That's a good, well, it's the same, basis as mage, so I would guess it's magus. But I could be wrong.
Shannen: Magus. Okay. His latest release, “The Little Blue Kite” is in bookstores now.
So, um, for a debut novel, if this was my debut novel, I would be so ecstatic. It is an incredible piece of work.
Gareth: Yeah, it is. You can understand why they study at university. There's a lot to study. Um, it's a very deep work, isn't it?
Shannen: Very deep. And I'm, I'm loving how you use the word “deep” because really it explores depth in a lot of different ways because you know that tunnel, and I'm sure we're going to talk about that tunnel in a lot more detail as we progress.
Gareth: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a really good analogy in fact would possibly be looking at a painting on a wall. The reader is the viewer. The painting is the book. And then you find that all of this is filtered through another reading. So you suddenly find yourself in another room staring into the first room and the painting and the wall, and then that's filtered through another one.
So you start heading down this corridor backwards and you find yourself staring down a corridor through multiple rooms at this painting, which is both, um, clearer and more obscured with every room you pass through. I think that's not a bad analogy for what it was like, for me anyway, to read it.
Shannen: Hmm. I did a bit of research online about how this book was written, and apparently “House of Leaves” appeared in multiple instalments on the internet before it was published in print form. What do you make of that? I mean, this has already been kind of produced online and then put together into paper form.
Gareth: Well, of course when he was writing it, the internet was a slightly different beast to what it is today. It was a lot more message boardy and, uh, I think, you know, there wasn't the social media aspect. So when he was sharing it around on the internet, it was a somewhat constrained thing. Not at all like sharing it around on the internet today. Certainly not another form of publication, if you like. But clearly there was an aspect of presentation around the whole thing. And uh, I should note, actually, I should note two things before we forget spoilers. There's going to be spoilers because we're delving deep, we're diving into these rooms and because it's a hazardous enough thing to begin with, we're not going to be worrying about spoilers because that could be fatal.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: And the other thing is that, Mark Z. Danielewski’s sister is the musical artist Poe, who released a companion album for the book, essentially.
Shannen: Oh, I didn't know that!
Gareth: And so, well, you never know what's going to come up with different researchers, right? You had all the good stuff. But I've got this one thing.
And yeah, so basically you can listen to “Haunted” whilst you are, you know, reading “House of Leaves”. It could be a different experience. I think there's a, there's a possibility of that because the book does lend itself to multiple incongruent readings, I think. Like, would you imagine yourself reading it again, Shannen, at some point?
Shannen: Yes. Definitely. And you've kind of stumbled on a really good question there. It's, you can read this book in so many different ways. For example, because there's so many different type faces in this book. You could read it by each character, and you can easily identify them by the typeface. You could read it like I did, which was kind of, would you say the more academic reading? Or pretending to be academic? Because a lot of the references are made up in this book where if a footnote number appeared, I would then look at the footnote, and then the footnotes. There's footnotes in footnotes within this book and sometimes the footnote number does not match to anything.
And then I'm looking for about two minutes for this number, trying to get the footnote. And now that I look back on it, the footnotes are made up. So why was I so intent on finding that reference? So that is another way that you can read it. The other way is, you know, through the whole book, and that's also going into the, because there's extra material, a lot of extra material on the back as well.
And then you said that you read it in a slightly different way.
Gareth: Yeah, I did. I ambled through it. I'm a stroller, like in life and in reading too. I stroll quickly as a reader, but I do stroll. So I find that, um, you know, when I go walking, in either context, I'm very interested in what's around me, you know. A sun beam will confuse me and I'll go darting off chasing a butterfly. That's kind of the way I am. And you know, Shannen, we were walking together just the other day. We actually managed to be within the same frame for a while and you walk in a very industrious way, I think. Like, it's very deliberate walking and no step is missed. And, you know, you probably get some actual physical benefit out of walking, whereas I make such a mess of it.
It does me no good at all. It probably takes years off my life. So I think you read “House of Leaves” that way. I think you were industriously hitting every foot, foothold, uh, as you climbed your way through it. And whereas I was just sort of stumbling down this corridor and down that corridor. I think in a way, if we had analogues in the, uh, story you would be Will Navidson and I would be Tom.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: And yeah. So I read it like I would read a bit of Johnny Truant’s story and I would be so held by that. I'd quickly read the, the Navidson’s bit, uh, and then hurry back to Truant. Other times I'd see Truant intrude and think, yeah, you know what, I'm too into what's happening here. And I would just let his bit go by.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: And I don't think Mark Z. Danielewski would have a problem with that. I think that that the book is structured to allow you, or even encourages you to do that, whilst at the same time saying you might miss something. And so for readers of that persuasion, there's the hunt is on through all the footnotes, whether they're real or imagined.
Isn't that marvellous?
Shannen: It is. It's a marvellous and a great book. And before we delve more into the labyrinth of this book, did you want to read a synopsis?
Gareth: I mean, I could try. I don't actually have one on me.
Shannen: Oh, actually I would just read it straight from the book’s cover.
Gareth: Oh, nice. Because mine just has rave reviews.
Shannen: Okay. So “Johnny Truant, wild and troubled, sometimes employee in an LA tattoo parlour, finds a notebook kept by Zampano, a reclusive old man found dead in a cluttered apartment. Herein is the heavily annotated story of the Navidson record. Will Navidson, a photo journalist and his family move into a new house. What happens next is recorded on video tapes and in interviews.
Now the Navidsons are household names, Zampano writing on loose sheets, stained napkins, cramped notebooks has compiled what must be the definitive work on the events on Ash Tree Lane. But Johnny Truant has never heard of the Navidson record, nor has anyone else he knows. And the more he reads about Will Navidson’s house, the more frightened he becomes. Paranoia besets him.
The worst part is that he can't just dismiss the notebook as the ramblings of a crazy old man. He's starting to notice things changing around him. Immensely imaginative, impossible to put down, impossible to forget. House of Leaves is thrilling, terrifying, and unlike anything you have ever read before”.
Gareth: Yeah. I mean that's not strictly true.
For example, the Leslie S. Klinger, “Sherlock Holmes” books, the annotated ones, or in fact, Klinger has done a whole bunch. He's done, uh, Lovecraft and various others. His edits of these books or annotations of them are so extensive they outstrip the text itself and so, at least in that regard, you do have a reading of a reading in an annotated text.
So that's not entirely new. The book uses things like concrete poetry, which is also not entirely new. And it touches on, I think, concepts of hypertext duality where you have, uh, footnotes that don't go anywhere. It's like going on the internet and you're like, oh, that's interesting, I'll click on that link. And it just says, page not available, 404 error.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: And I think that hypertext duality, at the time he was writing it was a big deal. People were talking about creating poems that existed on the internet. And as you found bits of them interesting, you could touch them and it would take you to a different version of the poem, different parts of it, and so you could build your own poem.
So it was in a sense, trying to recreate, you know, the experience of reading with interest. It sounds quite quaint now, but at the time it was like, oh my god, really? Like, it'll morph in front of your eyes. And no one even had a thought of touching the screen. We were all just dealing with these clunky corded mice - mouses.
But yeah, so in its parts, it's actually not that unusual. Nabokov with “Pale Fire”. You know, “Pale Fire” is a 999 lion epic poem by a poet called, oh, I want to say John Shade. And the book though is all about the annotations made by a self-styled and rather hapless academic called Kinbote, who doesn't really describe the poem at all. He just describes his own life and his goings on. And so you move in and out of the two. So all of these things have been done before.
Shannen: Yeah. So you're kind of saying that he's got fantastic lineage here.
Gareth: Oh, it does. Yeah. And people say, oh, it's gimmicky, and I find that very reductive. Because the way he uses structure and these devices creates effects that are the things people either love or hate about it.
And you can certainly hate it, but I think just swapping it off as gimmicky is weak. It's a very weak bit of criticism. It's a common one for this book. But it's so easy to dismantle or it's barely worth mentioning. So I don't know why it bothered. And yeah.
Shannen: Yeah. And I think he, he's not just doing it to be, we've used this word a lot. He's not doing it to be pretentious. I think he's doing it for a very specific reason. And I think the reason that I got from that is because this is - it's a horror. It's um, it's a horrible kind of story about what happens to this family inside this house. How all the relationships - dynamics change quite suddenly because of this extra variable that has entered into their lives.
But it's also a love story, and that's another question that I want to get into. But it is all these things. And the way that Danielewski has designed this story is that I know it's there, but I can't get immersed into it because at all these different stages, he's pulling me out of those feelings that I want to feel with, in that horror aspect, within that romantic aspect.
And when he is pulling me out, he's giving me something else to think about. It's, um, would you say it's like the postmodern, um, design what he's doing here?
Gareth: Yeah. Yeah. It is. It's a postmodern design. It's a meta text. It's a text that says I'm a text. The back of the book that you read, the synopsis assumes that Johnny Truant is in effect, our protagonist.
That's the way it's presented to us. But it's not Truant’s story as an alive thing. Truant’s story is part of this archive. We have an editor outside of that. Now that editor might even almost be us, I feel. The distinction, the editor's not named, not given an identity. It's a sort of an unformed persona and I feel like that's probably the reader is somewhere in the vicinity of the editor as an identity.
But the love story's interesting. I don't see it as a love story. We're going to differ on that. But I do recognize that there are, actually, a whole bunch of love stories in it. There's the love story between Will and Tom.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: And there's the love story between Johnny Truant and his mother. That's very much a love story, you know, and I mean that in the chased sense that one can love another person without it being sexual.
So there's very much a love story there. And the love story between Will Navidson and Karen is really interesting because he is able. He is equipped. He is equipped beyond the constraints of their relationship, I think, and she is not. And through the process of exploring this house, one does it, and then the other. He becomes disabled in a very strict sense.
He has, basically to be a photographer, he needs two working legs, two working arms, and two working eyes essentially for the kind of photographer he is. He loses one of each, I believe. And becomes disabled. Um, and potentially a lot happier for it, I think. Karen is quite weakened by things that have occurred in her life.
She's damaged. And through the process of investigating the house for her husband, trying to find him, she's the story's hero and she becomes very strong. She makes films that matter. The two are about her, are kind of in a sense more long lasting than the Navidson record. It's very interesting. Yeah, I find all of that stuff incredibly profound and you couldn't house it within a familiar genre structure.
You just can't make that book, I don't think.
Shannen: Yeah. Karen actually became one of my favourite characters. Because at the start, her, they describe her fear of claustrophobia, dark spaces and all this. There might be some familial rape background in her story, so she's quite a damaged character coming into this house.
And towards the end of it, like you said, she is the hero. She's the strongest character out of everyone who emerges out of that space. And I just want to read a section of this book, because this is where I felt that shift in the characters that I mentioned during one of our podcasts. It used to be about Johnny, it used to be about Will, and this is the point that it becomes about Karen.
So, “On Ash Tree Lane stands a house of darkness, cold and empty. In 16 millimetre stands, a house of light, love, and colour”.
So this is after she's created a film, the two films she mentioned.
“By following her heart, Karen made sense of what that place was not. She also discovered what she needed more than anything else. She stopped seeing Fallah, cut off questionable liaisons with other suitors, and while her mother talked of breaking up, filling the house and settlements, Karen began to prepare herself for reconciliation. Of course, she had no idea what that would entail or how far she would have to go.”
At that I was like, oh! This is such a great book!
And then, um, so she leaves her kids, she leaves the security of being in New York with her mother, and then we go onto page 522 . That's a great way to read the book. Okay, so she's gone to the house and she's been kind of living in it, looking for Navidson who's been gone for almost three months at this stage inside - or maybe not three months, but you know, inside the darkness of the house. There's no way to get in. There's no way to get out. Oh, and as she's filming, a hallway suddenly opens up. You know, it's just, it's also a very horrific moment to read.
Gareth: And it's using a particular trope of the thing creeping up on someone. And her reaction to it is surprising and really thrilling.
Shannen: Yeah. “As everyone knows, Karen stands there on the brink for several minutes, pointing her flashlight into the darkness and calling out for Navidson. When she finally does step inside, she takes no deep breath and makes no announcement. She just steps forward and disappears behind the black curtain A second later, that cold hollow disappears too, replaced by the wall exactly as it was before, except for one thing. All the children's drawings are gone”.
So you’re like, oh, you think this is it. She's also been swallowed up.
“Whatever ultimately allows Karen to overcome her fears, there is little doubt her love for Navidson is the primary catalyst. Her desire to embrace him as she has never done before, defeats the memories of that dark well, the molestations carried out by her stepfather, or whatever shadows her childhood truly conceals”.
At this moment she displays her restorative power. And then we're going into, you know, more quotes and stuff. But this is the real, the real gems that I found in that book.
Gareth: Yeah. And it's very told, isn't it? It's interesting. But you always know it's a one person's, it's Zampano’s interpretation of these things.
It's not the book telling you it's Zampano who was haunted by the book and didn't have a happy ending.
Shannen: Well, neither did Johnny
Gareth: Well, I don't know about Johnny.
Shannen: Johnny is a very interesting character. Let's talk about him for a bit.
Gareth: Well, I love Johnny. I think, if not Karen, then Johnny is my favourite character.
I love how he invents stories for other people. He tells you, he does this, he tells you he lies, then he lies to you. And then he goes, oh come on! How did you not see that coming? And things like that. I found that delightful. Also his, uh, the representation of his mental illness rang very true to me, having worked within and around mental illness.
Bless you. It's, yeah, it felt very real to me. I thought it was very convincing, very lived experience sort of stuff. Yeah. What did you think of Truant?
Shannen: He was, like you said, a very interesting character, in terms of the way that we read it. You mentioned that you were so involved in Johnny's character that you would sometimes skip the Navidson’s record.
Gareth: Yeah.
Shannen: I actually was like, okay Johnny, you're a liar. There's something else going on in your head. I'm actually more interested in the Navidson record, which is also false in made up entirely as well. There's a correlation between Johnny and his mum. So if you end up reading “The Whalestoe Letters”, that the mom sends to Johnny, there's a clear decline in her mental health and her mental capacity, which I see mirrored in Johnny's deterioration in his mental health as well. And then that reads as a question. Is it this Zampano’s record of the Navidson house that is creating this decline, as what we assume happened to Zampano. Or is it a family trait? Is it, is this something that he inherited from his mother and certain events in his life kind of was the catalyst for that?
So Johnny's was a very interesting story. And the part, the most enjoyable lie to me on his end was, you mentioned it, he starts talking about how he's getting better because he went and saw two doctor friends and they're helping him with special medications and special drugs. And I've reread the letters from his mom and she says the exact same thing.
She said, oh the new director's giving me new drugs and feeling a lot better, and you think she is, and then she's dead. It's kind of very similar to Johnny. Even though we don't know exactly what happens to him, but there's a huge similarity between those two characters.
Gareth: Oh yeah, there is. There is.
And also the director, the mother talks about the old director and the new director and then it turns out the new director was still the old director and then there is a new director and, and so you never really have your feet under you in that book. And I think this is what it boils down to.
I think people will either, enjoy the experience of not having their feet under them, or they won't. I personally, uh, so back in the day, I wrote and produced some films. Nothing like the Navidson record, but I wrote and produced some films and I was working with a fellow, he was the director, I was the writer and the producer, and we went to, Rosell Mental Hospital. Which is long since shutdown. And that, you know, it was basically, we were looking, we were doing a reccy for locations, um, to shoot a horror film in. And so we got there and the guide, you know, you'd get to ask the guide, who drove us to the specific building we were interested in.
And she said, well I'll wait outside. And we were like, you're not going to tour his through? And she went, hell no, I'm not going in there! And I was like, oh, that's a bit saucy. Isn't that like, you know, she's built up our kind of, oh, it's all horror stories. But, and that's how I understood it. Anyway, so we walked to the front door, myself and my friend, and he handed me the camera and said, you do the photos, I'm leaving.
And I was like, you're joking. Okay, now you're really pulling my leg. And he went, I can't be in here. And he just walked outside, left me with the camera. Now, I'm not that great a photographer, and it was dark and I didn't know what I was doing. And so I wandered around this darkened hospital. There were no lights.
All the electricity was gone. For about an hour, taking photos of this and that, going into the bathrooms and uh, you know, all the stalls with the doors ripped off and into the room where they would give people, I assume baths. There was a strange tub with all kinds of tubes and such, like an operating table that included water.
I don't know if that was some sort of treatment, couldn't tell you. But essentially, I just kept walking through disturbing room after disturbing room. You know, and it was mostly in the dark, and I'm not really, there's a part of your brain that allows you to see kind of flickers in the mist, if you like.
And I always think, you know, that's what those footnotes that lead nowhere, they're falling shadows that make you go, huh? And then there's nothing there. I don't have that bit of, my brain just doesn't work. So I walked around this place, which apparently was tremendously brave, but it wasn't to me because I wasn't even remotely frightened.
And I just wandered around, took the photos, they weren't that good, and left. And what I loved about “House of Leaves” was that in the descriptions of the explorations, he evoked what I assume everyone else was feeling while I was exploring the hospital. Like, and so I got to have this kind of creepy feeling, which I can't seem to produce in myself, and I loved that. And I did think about that trip around Rossel Mental Hospital, and all the dark corridors that look exactly the same. And yeah, it for me, it worked tremendously well as a horror story. Again, you know, dead in that part of my brain. I found myself moved by the creepiness at times.
So I think that's a high bar. So my hat's off on that regard. But you say it's more of a love story, Shannen, did you find it frightening at all?
Shannen: Yes, I did find it frightening. And I do have another amazing quote, and this is the point that I was like, that's creepy. That's horrific. So at this stage, we're only, it’s a very big book, and we’re only here within it. That's, I don't know, one 10th? One 20th?
Gareth: Yeah, something like that.
Shannen: That weird stuff starts happening. So we are now discovering that the inside of the house is bigger than the outside of the house. Oh, and this is another thing that I think the book does really well.
It, every single character deals with the trauma of what's happening in very different ways. There's no same character deal dealing with the same trauma in the same way. It's all different.
“When confronting the spatial disparity in the house, Karen set her mind on familiar things while Navidson were in search of a solution.”
So, Karen builds a bookshelf with one of her best friends, and we continue on.
“Oddly enough, a slight draft keeps easing one of the closet doors shut. It has an eerie effect because each time the door closes, we lose sight of the children.
‘Hey, would you mind propping that open with something?’ Navidson asks his brother.
Tom turns to Karen’s shelves and reaches for the largest volume he can find, a novel. Just as with Karen, it's removal causes an immediate domino effect. Only this time as the books topple each other, the last few do not stop at the wall as they had previously done, but fall instead to the floor, revealing a least a foot between the end of the shelf and the plaster.
Tom thinks nothing of it. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbles and leans over to pick up the scattered books, which is exactly when Karen screams.”
So there's kind of a build-up of Karen building this bookshelf and then that final part. And I'm like, oh God, I got it! Deep feels there. And it's surprising how well, because Zampano's manuscript is detailing film and he's writing about a film that doesn't exist.
How well the description, even though we're not seeing the film, works and translates into the text form. And he does a great job of creating that horrific effect of describing something, uh, third person, and there's this creature. Did you want to talk about the dark lurking creature that never gets fully seen or described?
Gareth: Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm not sure the creature does exist, so I think it, it almost defies description. It should be noted that Zampano is blind.
Shannen: Oh yes, actually.
Gareth: Yeah, which I think is interesting because he's constantly talking about visuals and a film and many films. Uh, and I think that's all just wonderful.
Shannen: Actually, yeah. How does he describe the films if he can't see them?
Gareth: Indeed! It's all just terrific, really.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: I can't describe the monster, but what I can do, because I think the monster's formless. And that's a good thing. Because we all know, we discussed this in our would-be review of a couple of horror films recently, that once you see the evil, it ceases to be quite so terrifying.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: There was actually a film made in, oh, was it 2021? Well, it was recently in any case. Called “You Should Have Left”, starring Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried. Now, Mark Danielewski sued the makers of this film because it features, among other things, a house that turns out to be larger on the inside than the out, and one that features a seemingly bottomless staircase.
I have no skin in this game. Perhaps these ideas, I mean, you know, in Doctor Who the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than the outside, I suppose, you know, it could be anything. I'm not to say, and Danielewski lost his case and couldn't prove that he'd been plagiarized. However, I think it is possible to compare the two. And in “You Should Have Left” we get to see the nature of the monster, if you like. And we also get to see these ideas framed within a conventional horror narrative. And, you know, it's not brilliant. Um, it's not brilliant at all, I'm sorry to say. And, but I really appreciated watching the film because it really showed me, and people go, oh, well you, “House of Leaves” could have been a lot scarier.
I actually don't know that it could have been. Because I think as soon as you adopt the standard tropes of horror, these ideas that feel so unfamiliar and they're so hard to get your feet under you with, you know, this film, you can't see, uh, explained by a blind man who was being tormented and was a shut in, found by a, you know, a drug addict, um, guy with a history of mental illness who then tries to, uh, confirm its veracity,
You know, this is not the stuff of reliable narrative and you wouldn't want it to be. So I think that's one of the really powerful things about it. Horror. Horror is a series of moments, isn't it? Like, you know, it's ideas and moments.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: And sometimes they can be maintained as an entertainment, but you find that typically with horror films, they rely on frights. Because it's so hard to maintain chills and true horror.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: So yeah, I would say that would be my defence of “House of Leaves” structure in terms of its validity as a horror novel. I would say to anyone who goes, it could have been done better in a more traditional way. Go see, uh, I've forgotten its name now. That's how great it was . . . “You Should Have Left”, and then you can see how good that would've, that would've been.
Shannen: Yeah. I agree with you on the horror aspect because like you said, a lot of these, um, horror movies, once you show the monster or you know, it doesn't become believable. Whereas all the horror aspects within this house, you've got claustrophobia, which is a huge phobia for a lot of people.
You've got darkness, again a huge phobia. Never ending silence, so just not being able to contact another human being, be able to hear anything. It just disappears into this never ending nothingness. Nothingness is another one. This thing that is forever shifting and changing. Change is a huge phobia for people as well.
You never feel constant or stable. It has all these elements within it and, I said, you know, horror movies aren't believable. And I mean, a house that's forever changing, I suppose it's not believable, but it still incorporates those very real fears in a slightly different manner. Another one, being cold, being attacked by the shadow that you can never see.
I don't know. I mean, this is a horror of mine, you know, walking late at night on the street, the street lamp is flickering and you see these moving shadows. That's what I pictured when reading about this creature. It, you know it's not real, but you still get that quickening of breath, the heart rate elevating.
That's what I felt reading those passages on the characters, uh, the creature, not the characters. It is a horrific book in that sense. And I think they, I agree with you. They've done a great job of bringing that horror element into it.
Gareth: Yeah. And I mean, you know, so much is framing, like right now for our listeners on our listening platforms, Shannen is in a different location.
Let me describe this to you as, I shut my eyes. Uh, no I won't. So she's in a different location. It could almost be the same location in a different room, who's to say? But, so the back wall is very far behind her. It's brick. It has a curtain over what might be a window, but it's difficult to tell because it doesn't seem to be much light passing through it.
That, in itself, is this moment of disconnect to her immediate left, which will be the right of the screen, if you're watching at home. You have a wall that appears to have been recently put up. It doesn't appear, oh! She's gone dark too. It's got paint patches on it. It doesn't appear to touch the ceiling. It appears to be some sort of wall in between. What do they call those? A partition wall. There we are. And what's it hiding? I mean, I haven't seen Luke this entire podcast, and you start to, and so these shapes, you know, the distance of the back wall, the side wall would not be nearly so noticeable, if the back wall was closer.
And I really think the architecture of “House of Leaves”, the way the different blocks of text are positioned is what gives it a lot of its power in much the same way. You know, we've talked about the OuLiPo Group. And someone like Georges Perec with lifer users' manual, he tells a story caught in one moment of time.
That's very much, I don’t know what you call this, but basically it's like the facade of the house has been cutaway so you can see inside every apartment at once, uh, there's a scientific thing for that. I can't remember what you call it, but where you cut something away and you can see inside it. But –
Shannen: Dissection?
Gareth: No, it's like a, oh geez. You know, if you're listening at home, it might, you know, help us out here. You know, we're not, we're a book podcast. But essentially, you know, these structures and the perspectives you get and, and sort of architecture as a structuring technique in, uh, in literature actually does have a bit of a heritage to it, which is quite interesting.
So yeah, I think, I don't think anything that Danielewski has done has been accidental. And I think when you look for alternatives in his work - or you're going to, you're going to slap me down. Get in there.
Shannen: No, I wasn't. I was patiently waiting for you to finish so it can raise another question.
Gareth: Oh, I know.
Shannen: Navidson had a lot to lose in the end of this book. I mean, he's already lost his brother, but you know, he's a father to his children and he has a beautiful wife. Why do you think Navidson went back into the house?
Gareth: Oh, that's a good question. I suppose, what I would say before I try to answer it is, do you have an answer to that question?
Shannen: Yes and no.
So I think the reason why Karen is such an extraordinary character and she's able to go in and out with relative ease to, compared to a lot of these other characters that are consumed by the darkness inside, is because she never had this sense of having to conquer it. She had to conquer herself first. Which she does when she goes inside. Navidson in the end, you know, he loses his ability to take photos, he loses that ability to conquer . . . Oh, where am I going with this?
But being able to conquer what his career is, um, it's over. I don't know why he goes back inside.
Gareth: Well, no, I think you're onto something. Hmm. Yes.
Shannen: I think I am. I just need to nut it out.
Gareth: You’ve sparked a neuron somewhere in my head. Um, I think, okay. So if you think about, Delial, is it Delial or Delial?
Shannen: I call it Delial.
Gareth: Let's go with Delial.
Shannen: Which is kind of like denial. And I think that's purposeful as well. If I'm saying it right. Let us know, Danielewski.
Gareth: Yeah. And I suppose that's the word “lie” in it too. But that's all about perspective. That's kind of why I was riffing on the room you're. This book deals enormous amount on with perspective and the perspective of that picture is what haunts him. Because it's his position, in relation to the child and the vulture. That's what haunts him, and that's what's described in enormous detail. The use of space to the right of everything else. So his culpability, his guilt is housed in this concept of geometry and architecture. So of course, a house would be the thing that would be problematic for him. Especially a house whose perspectives keep shifting.
Navidson, in his exploration of the house, his final exploration, has all of his concepts of perspective ruined, one by one. He goes down a hill. He turns around, turns out to still be going downhill. Things get bigger, they get smaller. He gets a sense that he can grab onto something. There's some light.
There's a window there, doesn't mean anything. He keeps having all these things taken away from him until finally there is nothing at all. He's not falling, or he might be falling, but he could be falling upwards. He could be going in any direction. He might not be moving at all. He loses all of it. And I think what the house takes from him is what he needs to lose to survive.
And really, you know, the negative effect the house has on some of the other characters, you could almost describe as incidental, but certainly it seems to work a little bit like a mirror. But yeah.
Shannen: I got that sense as well.
Gareth: It takes everything away from him that was in a sense, bothering him.
You know, pretty aggressive way. Like, this is an amputation. And then it takes from him the things that could have allowed him to continue down that self-destructive path. It takes his, takes one of his eyes, which wrecks your sense of depth perception and perspectives. Just a disaster. Takes one of his hands, which, you know, if you've ever tried to use a camera one handed, it’s actually not that easy. And takes one of his legs, which makes traveling around the world a lot more difficult.
And so, you know, it's very poetic in that way. But I think it's not heavy handed. So when I first thought, when I first read it, I kind of went, oh bummer! That's bad for him. And then as the story settles into its ending, it gives you a bit of time. So thinking, actually, this couldn't have worked out any better for him.
Shannen: Yeah. And I like the contrast, because at the start of the book, both characters, Karen and Navidson are described as incredibly attractive characters. Karen had a modelling career. She's still incredibly beautiful, but she's broken. She's not whole. At the end of the book she becomes whole within herself.
She still has her beauty, but then Navidson is different at the end. He's broken apart. He's not a whole person, but he finally can be a whole person. And I agree, the ending was, it couldn't have been better. Very purposely constructed.
Gareth: Yeah, and also I think part of the horror of it is that it may not have worked out that way.
It wouldn't have worked out that way for him without Karen, and I didn't see her as the hero of the book until she became the hero of the book. Which I think accidental heroes are very much where heroes tend to be. And so all of those things, it's all incredibly intentional. It's all very carefully presented, and I don't think it's haphazard.
And again, going back to the concept of gimmicky, it just isn't. It just isn't gimmicky. It's a very original. What would you call it? Um, construction of complex literary devices.
Shannen: Yeah. I want to make one final point of why I think it's a love story before moving on to my next question. And it's actually a mission that you found in the text.
So the reason why I think this is a love story is because I've been watching a lot of Korean drama. And in Korean drama their love, and I thought about why it takes so long to develop and it even takes, um, lifetimes, generations, for love to happen in Korean drama. And I came to the conclusion that love in Korea or Asia, even, means patience.
Love is patience. I will wait. I will be there. Whereas love, in the western sense, is sacrifice, I think. In the end, this is a love story because Karen is willing to sacrifice everything to go see Will Navidson, and I came, I thought about this on the ride home from you because we were talking about the Puritans and how in the end the bag guy has to die.
But then in the end, you know, the whole point of Christianity is about love and it's about sacrifice. You know, Jesus to admit you of all your sins, et cetera. This is why I think this is an incredibly deep love story, especially in our Western sphere.
Gareth: That's a very sophisticated reading.
I couldn't possibly disagree with any of that. My only thought is that it remains if you think about it, right. So you said the context within which you’re arriving at this conclusion is around, Korean dramas, and such, and also a discussion we had. So I would say that for you it's a love story, and for many other people.
Shannen: It’s a love story with a horror aspect.
Gareth: I don't think it is. But I don't think it's a horror story with a love aspect. I guess what I'm trying to say is I think “House of Leaves” shifts to be whatever you are going to find in it at the time. I could certainly see a love story in it, but for me it was very much a horror story and even a horror story that, in many senses, well, you know, had a happy ending. It allowed you to think that it might not have had a happy ending, that it was just almost there, but for the grace of Karen, you know, if she hadn't been up to the task, she didn't seem like she'd be up to the task, but it was believable when it happened.
It was masterfully done. But I read it as a horror story, I think. But I could imagine that if I read it again in a month, I might read it as a love story. But I think, I guess all I'm disputing is I think this book is open to multiple primary readings, and I think its structure has a lot to do with that.
It's enormous achievement. Like anyone who criticizes it almost inevitably tries to deconstruct its authenticity. You know, like it's a gimmick. It's just trying to be clever. Which is a, you know, an interesting concept in the first place because a book can't really try to do anything. It requires the reader to make some of the effort.
I think readers who, who feel that a book is trying to be clever, might feel that they are not clever enough. And I think this is where you run into trouble. I've noticed that some of the very critical reviews said the book made me feel dumb, and I certainly don't think that was the intention of the book.
So yeah, I think we see ourselves in it, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: Yeah.
Shannen: Yeah, it's a multiple level reading book and it's a shame that people feel dumb. I mean, the footnotes are fake. It's not, it's never meant to have been read in the academic sense. But moving on.
So on page 320, Zampano appears to have written a typo. What is that typo, Gareth? If you want to read that out.
Gareth: Let me grab my big copy here. Yes.
Shannen: It's a very big book.
Gareth: It is a big book. It's a mighty book. “Regrettably, Tom fails to stop at a sip. A few hours later he's finished off the whole fifth, as well as half a bottle of wine. He might have spent all night drinking had exhaustion not caught up with me.”
This was one of several times during the book where I went, hey - what now? Have we just hit a typo? What's going on there? I don't, you know, I don't know what's going on there. Um, but I found my reading immediately disturbed. This is a book that wants to do that over and over again.
Shannen: Yeah. And, um, it's a great omission. I mean, because at certain times throughout the book, Truant will point out typos, or he even makes addition to Zampano’s work. At one stage he said, yes, I changed that. Oh, you didn't notice, did you? So is it an addition? Is it a typo?
Gareth: Or example, he was just tired when he was constructing Tom's story.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: He couldn't get through the night with Tom, so that's why Tom didn't drink through the night. It's just the possibility.
Shannen: Yeah. And the other thing, and this might be a bit of a conspiracy theory for the book. Is it possible that Zampano was actually a member of the Navidson family? And it didn't, it never occurred to me. So everyone gets out of the tunnel. Except for Holloway, because we assume he dies.
But, you know, Tom disappears. Is there a potential that Zampano’s actually Tom?
Gareth: It seems unlikely to me.
Shannen: Okay.
Gareth: I think, for starters, Tom has wrecked hands. You would think that would've been a description included of Zampano.
Shannen: Okay.
Gareth: When, because Johnny Truant, you know, had had an acquaintance with him.
I have one more quote for you. This desire, this is from page 119. “This desire for exteriority is no doubt further amplified by the utter blankness found within. Nothing there provides a reason to linger, in part because not one object, let alone fixture, or other manner of finish work has ever been discovered there.
Back in 1771, Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his discourses on art, argued against the importance of the particular. Calling into question, for example, my new detention to the discriminations of drapery. The clothing is neither woollen, nor linen, nor silk, nor satin, or velvet. It is drapery. It is nothing more”. End quote.
“Such global appraisal seems perfectly suited for Navidson's house, which despite its corridors and rooms of various sizes, is nothing more than corridors and rooms. Even if sometimes, as John Updyke once observed in the course of translating the labyrinth quote, the galleries seem straight, but curve vertically.” End quote.
So that to me, you know, you could use that description to interrogate “House of Leaves” as a book. It's very much involved with the particulars. It constantly draws your attention to the particulars. This is not a book as drapery. This is a book where, you know, you are encouraged constantly to think about the fact that you’re reading it.
And if you think about it, all the characters in this book, after the Navidson’s sons themselves are readers and their life is tremendously disturbed by the act of reading “House of Leaves”. And I suppose my question to you, Shannen, as we near the end of this review is, you know, I've noticed during this new room it has an unpainted partition wall.
Who knows what's behind it? It does appear to have crept up on you. Do you feel in entirely safe in your current surroundings? Has the “House of Leaves” tended to follow you around in your day-to-day life?
Shannen: Very good question. Yes, and I'm going, and that leads me to my star rating for this book. To me, a book has succeeded in what I wanted to do, which is change me and make me think.
I came up with the why I thought it was a love story yesterday, is because I'm still thinking about way after finishing my reading of it, which was a couple of weeks ago now. I first said to you that this was an un-star-able book because, you know, it's a horror book, it's a love story. But in the end it's neither of those things.
So how do you rate something that's so incomparable? I can't put it on a tier system with anything else that I've read. So I was only left with its ability to rate it as has it shifted my perspective? Has it changed me? And so it would be a five star for that reason. And before you go onto your rating, I just want to read something out as well.
And this would probably be for the writers, for our readers and writers of our podcast. So this is a side note, an interesting side note on Danielewski. So, we say this is his debut novel, but he actually wrote his first book at the age of 10, and it was nearly 400 pages about a boy who grows up to become a cocaine addict in New York City and ends up in prison.
So his parents found it disturbing. He later showed it to a high school teacher who rejected it as being dirty because of his use of four letter words. Because of these and similar experiences, Danielewski became reluctant to show his work to anyone else. Now, for aspiring writers, you know, this is an amazing book. It's just been given a five star review from me, which is hard to get.
I just want to say keep producing your works because it is going to become something and it's probably going to become something as good as Danielewski’s.
Gareth: Well, I would say that's definitely something to swing for. You know, when I started the book, I had a beautiful dark brown beard, and now I have these white streaks, and that was just the horror of reading it.
Yeah. And don't go back through our previous podcast and find the lie in that. But yeah, no, I'd give it five stars as well. And I think the reason, I think for starters, it's beautiful. It's construction. It's complexity. That ease with which you can throw off parts of it and still enjoy the whole.
I think it's a, yeah, I would say it's a masterpiece. I think it's taken together a lot of very difficult forms, tied them together into a bizarre lunatic house of leaves. And I think it's marvellous. I really enjoyed it. I think people should absolutely at least give a few pages a try, and just be easy on yourself.
Like wandering into a house like this is not, not a straightforward thing. If it unsettles you, if you find it difficult to read, if you find yourself, you know, bored or unsettled or have a sudden feelings of self-loathing, just allow those to settle because we all have those things when we enter the House of Leaves, I think.
So yeah, I loved it. Absolutely. Five stars.
Shannen: Yeah, I loved it too.
Gareth: What a lot of pressure for the next book, right? The pressure is on us to pick an excellent next book for review.
Shannen: Okay! We've thrown a few titles around and I picked “House of Leaves”. So what did you end up deciding?
Gareth: Well, I've given this a lot of thought and it really boiled down to two.
Mariana Enríquez’s “Things We've Lost In The Fire”. However, that's another quote unquote horror novel. They both fall into the same genre and Good Reads categorization. So I feel like that one might want to wait a little bit. So I thought we should go for something profoundly different and I think Margaret Atwood's “Murder In The Dark” would be the way I would suggest we go for the next one.
I'm quite excited by that, and I think there's quite a lot in that, that we can look at from the point of view of creative writing and writing exercises, and such. So I think that'll be a good way to head us towards the end of the year.
Shannen: Well, that's a fantastic idea. Did you want to give a spill on Margaret Atwood before we call it a day?
Gareth: No, I think, I think Margaret Atwood, I mean, you know, to be honest with you, I don't know what I would say about the woman. She's very impressive. So I think we'll leave that for next time. I'm going to put together a little bit of a monument for her because you know, I can't half ass this particular thing.
But I am very excited about it. “Murder In The Dark” is an incredible book. It's a very short book, so if you are following along at home, we have taken pity on you. Expect this book to be about a 10th the size of the last one. But equally wonderful.
Shannen: Yeah. Well today was so much fun. I really enjoyed reviewing “House of Leaves”. I enjoyed reading it so much. And to our audience, if you want to share your feelings and reviews on “House of Leaves”, please contact us at the pleasureofthetext.com. Leave us a message. We're also on Instagram and Facebook, so go over there, join the Facebook page and we're also putting our tendrils out to other social medias. So hopefully we'll see you guys over there as well. And did you have any last things to say before we head off for a beautiful weekend, Gareth?
Gareth: Um, no. Enjoy your beautiful weekend, but make sure you've got a book with you just in case the weather turns sour.
Shannen: Yeah. Wherever you may be in the world, always carry a book with you.
Gareth: Exactly. Always have one near at hand. It's quite important.
Shannen: Okay! Well we will see you next time at “The Pleasure Of The Text”.
Gareth: Looking forward to it.
Shannen: Bye everyone!
Gareth: Bye!