House of Leaves
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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• ISBN13: 9780375703768
• Condition: New
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Book Reviews of House of Leaves

Book Review: Watershed of high postmodernism
Summary: 5 Stars

The first and immediate problem is cramming this book into a genre. It is not simply "genre-bending"--it questions the very idea of "genre" as such. In this light, as others have said, it cannot be approached as a "novel" strictly speaking. There has long been hostility among academics for people who expect everything to be an "easy read". Yet this book can't be approached in the same way as the celebrated pinnacles of high modernism like Ulysses or White Noise. Neither would I imagine people like Harold Bloom or Thomas Foster (who would actually read his book "How to read literature like a professor"?) have good things to say about this work.

If Joyce's Ulysses was the landmark novel of high modernism in the twentieth century, Danielewski's House of Leaves is arguably the greatest novel of the twenty-first century (so far) and, I think, is possibly the watershed of high POSTmodernity. The San Diego Tribune was, I believe, perfectly justified in comparing Danielewski to Melville, Joyce, and Nabakov. Any attempt at paraphrasing the work would be sacrilegious as seem to be most interpretations of it. One exception is a review quoted on the back cover: "A love story by a semiotician. Danielewski has a songwriter's heart as attuned to heartache as he is to Derrida's theory on the sign". More accurately, this work is the penultimate manifestation of Derrida's deconstruction of philosophy and literature (although it is arguably still "(phallo)logocentric"). Danielewski's erudition is astonishing, though not for its own sake: rather, for what he does with it. He is not a scholar; he is, indubitably, an artist and his excursus on Heidegger, Freud and the uncanny (unheimlich), Derridan deconstruction, as well as his appropriation of the horror genre makes the book unsettling in a way only a novel can. Danielewski is keenly aware of the power of images to unsettle us (e.g., the Matrix or, alternatively, any number of horror films, particularly the older variety as opposed to the rivers-of-blood slashers today) and he shows us how text (viz. words) can unsettle us even more profoundly. Since the use of words (language) is the way by which we structure the world, Danielewski uses this fact to use his text (the text itself in some places) to disturb the very thing by which we make sense of the world--he disturbs our security at our conceptual roots. The "monster-in-the-dark"--the unknown--is unsettling per se; Danielewski unROOTS us until we are left hanging but by a thread to the habits and nomological security of language with which we operate on a day-to-day basis. It is not what might be in the dark or what the dark conceals that leaves us frightened--it is the dark itself. He has, further, in a single swoop, preempted (or at least undermined) the very possibility of an exegesis of his work and the hermenutic discipline in toto (I suppose I could also have said "he has undermined hermenutics as a discipline"). (Whether or not he intended to do so is, of course, patently irrelevant.) Danielewski has provided, too, a commentary on the metanarrative involved in the consideration of the book as a physical object and, as such, an object of representation and aesthetic judgment (inverting the dialectic of form and content, showing how the book itself (the form) can be evaluated aesthetically).

There are those who like to call themselves "bibliophiles" or, to adapt another term, "petit-intellectuals" who make claims about what "good" literature is (e.g., it has to have a coherent plot, substantial character development). While, of course, everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, obviously this book will not draw favorable readings from those tied inexorably to the sacred literary canon. These are the same ones who hold "the new left" or "cultural studies" to be convenient labels for everything bad that has happened to "literature" over the last half century; these are also the same individuals to whom the word "postmodern" elides all the vulgarity of contemporary culture. These are, finally, the same ones who do not care to make analytical distinctions between postmodernism and, say, kitsch, and who seem to believe postmodernism simply means "anything goes". To this all I can say is that this understanding of "postmodernism" is, to say the least, incomplete and consequent judgments irresponsible. It is easy to lambast things one does not like; it is another thing entirely to critique a thing while at the same time doing it justice.

One doesn't have to be an academic or a literary critic to read this work, but at the same time one cannot expect it simply "to tell a story". Respectfully I must disagree entirely with the reviewer from Phoenix who said this work was neither art, postmodern, controversial, nor good. Granted "postmodern" is a fairly ambiguous term, this reviewer apparently doesn't understand, first, what "postmodernism" means and, second, that a postmodern work would be suspicious of anyone calling it "good" or "bad" and taking that judgment on good faith. Neither does this reviewer seem to understand the history of literary criticism that is invoked in his/her critique of the book's narrative structure ("confusing" seems to be a common word). Sure the narrative is borrowed from Nabakov, but the narrative structure of House of Leaves is meant to be self-reflexively critical--it is meant to challenge and question the notion of "narrative structure" AS SUCH. This reviewer said, too, that "it pains me to think this book was published". I agree: it pains me to think this book was published, for Danielewski has opened himself up for the barbs and stings of Nietzsche's plundering soldiers who trample through a book "take a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole".

Summary of House of Leaves

For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.

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