When we first moved back to Los Angeles in 1998 I had a recurring dream that our house had many more rooms than I knew about. That our long neglected bungalow needed a lot of work, no doubt, triggered these nightmares in my subconscious. I’d often wake up remembering a bible passage I’ve always found odd and ambiguous–John 14:2, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”
Interior of the Westin Bonneventure
So I come to my principal point here, that this latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mapable external world. It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its environment—which is the initial bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of the spacecraft to those of the automobile—can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.
Danielewski reinforces the hyperspacial theme via the text of the book, with ever shifting typography and an ongoing dialog between the two plot lines taking place via footnotes within footnotes, a mixture of both real and fabricated references and even digressing into a self referential panel discussion featuring Camille Paglia. I had initially attempted to read the book on a Kindle but you need a hard copy of this book in order to navigate it (Yay physical media!).
House of Leaves seems to have both haunted and confounded many people since its release. The first bookstore I tried to buy it at, San Francisco’s terrific horror and Science Fiction specialists Boarderlands, said that they always have a copy on hand, except for the day I went. I think two things about this book resonate: the postmodern hyperspace horror we all traverse on a daily basis, combined with the fact that, ultimately, this book is no dry experimental exercise but, rather, a profound story of love and loss(1). I’ll also note that the accuracy of the depiction of East Hollywood, taking place in the footnotes, resonated with me as we live very close and this part of the city and I’ve always found it spooky, as if haunted by the collective desperation of many souls across a backdrop of dark streets, crumbling bungalows, feral cats and rundown 60s era apartment buildings.
It would be a spoiler to get too much into the love story, but I’ll just say that Danielewski proves that a post-modern novel need not lack emotional resonance. In fact, the condition and characteristics of post-modernity, the non-linear jump cuts, the instability of the grand narratives of the past, the hyperspacial horror of our built environment don’t, in any way, diminish our trajectories and navigations between birth, love, impermanence, uncertainty and death.
From a poem in one of the book’s appendices:
Little solace comes
to those who grieve
when thoughts keep drifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves
moments before the wind
Oh, I have that dream, too!
Your post freaked me out. You have a footnote/hyperlink (nice touch) but when I went back to click on it, it wasn’t there! Thought I was losing my damn mind before I found it. A perfect metaphor for how the “hidden room/decaying environment” thing feels.
I don’t think it’s possible to read the Navidson record and not be haunted by the fall. But I gave this book to a friend promising it wasn’t that scary but then he did a deep dive into the tiny font sideways sections and he said it messed him up a bit. For better or worse, you will always remember reading it, which more than I can say for most books of that period.