House of Leaves
HOUSE OF LEAVES
By Mark Z. Danielewski.
709 pp. New York:
Pantheon Books.
By ROBERT KELLY
There is a dream that I, like many people, have: I am walking in my own house and suddenly find a room, attic, cellar or whole suite of rooms I never knew was there. It is clearly mine, but also amazingly, bewilderingly, other -- a new space. Each time I awake full of joy at this discovery, tinged with disappointment at the unexpanded circumstance of what I must call the actual house.
Anyone who has had such a dream should welcome the pioneering effort of Mark Z. Danielewski, whose wonderful first novel, ''House of Leaves,'' is a vast exploration and meditation on the paradoxical spaces that open out from -- or as -- our awareness. To make sure the word ''meditation'' doesn't daunt you into a coma of respectful abstention, let me say right off that his book is funny, moving, sexy, beautifully told, an elaborate engagement with the shape and meaning of narrative. For all its modernist maneuvers, postmodernist airs and post-postmodernist critical parodies, ''House of Leaves'' is, when you get down to it, an adventure story: a man starts traveling inside a house that keeps getting larger from within, even as its outside dimensions remain the same. He is entering deep space through the closet door.
Danielewski's book is full of games and (sometimes sophomoric) drollery, but rather than diffusing its power, these mannerisms, with their endless deadpan catalogs of actual (I guess) architects and architectural terms, of photographers, of building materials, all seem, oddly enough, to help things roll forward and prevent the dead weight of the powerful allegorical imagery on which the novel is based from crushing the narrative line. Since Danielewski has chosen to examine the horrific absence at the heart of life, he may think that, along the way, we need all the incidental cheer we can get. In any case, I fell for it -- the scholastic, footnoted, typographical fun house aspect of the book. I love the difficult, since it makes the easy seem finally possible.
In brief: An unnamed group of editors presents us with a complicated jumble of manuscripts furnished by an eloquent, diffident young loser, an apprentice in a Southern California tattoo parlor called Johnny Truant. Johnny tells (in typewriter typeface) the story of his discovery of more disparate manuscript materials inherited from a mysterious blind man named Zampanò. These materials provide evidence of a huge project in film and photography.The blind man's description of the film work that he has never seen is the core of the book -- set in normal print. (Throughout, the typeface tells us where we are, even if it's not always clear which narrator or compiler we're being lectured by, or what his state of mind might be.) The film is ''The Navidson Record'' -- a kind of indoor ''Blair Witch Project,'' an essay in independent documentary filmmaking that goes terribly awry. Men die. Someone is crippled. Someone else is healed.
Navidson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, buys a home for his longtime companion, Karen Green, and their two children in rural Virginia. One day, a door appears in a wall. On opening the door, they find a dark, undefined space. This space stretches and contracts, extends for indefinite distances into, under and beyond the earth, right out through the house into dimensions that are impossible to fathom. Five expeditions -- all faithfully, professionally, futilely recorded in various media -- try to explore this space.
The story of these expeditions interacts with an account of Navidson's relationship with Karen, from whom he ventures and tries to return. Karen, painfully transiting from cover girl to soccer mom (or, for a harsher critic, one female cliché to another), exudes bafflement, tenderness, rage. Her character is finally as amorphous as the dark spaces within the house. For it is her house too, and one reading of this book might suggest that these perilous, seductive abysses can be probed like the feminine psyche itself, that they represent the Other Woman whom the jealous Karen sees her husband constantly attending.
The explorations themselves, though vivid enough to stock a boy's book of adventures, are not told directly. Instead, samplings of fancifully titled articles and monographs provide us with descriptions of Navidson's efforts to document the darkness, a darkness through which men (only men) travel, coming home with poignant scraps of film, the world flared into invisibility by the very light itself.
So we are reading a story about a story about a story about a film about a house with a black hole in it. The hole is the core of the experience. Picture walking about in freezing, absolute darkness in a place that shrinks and expands, a place where staircases suddenly sink away to bottomless depths or compress to flatness. Picture such an abyss of utter vacuity spurring off through an ordinary house. C. S. Lewis's armoire that opens into Narnia is a charming fancy, while Navidson's cave is an affront to our sense of space and direction, like those memorable geometries of H. P. Lovecraft, in which obtuse angles behave as if they were acute -- angles swallowing us down.
Why do explorers go to such places? Why do we? Navidson and his companions, including his long-estranged twin brother, outfitted with their meticulous catalogs of technical gear, act with a sheer determination that infuses the craziness of everyday life with the rare, pure madness of Captain Ahab. We go to unknown places to find out what is there, and we go all the more eagerly when (as at the top of Mount Everest, for example) there is precisely nothing there.
Much of the story is in the footnotes -- full of girls, Johnny's picaresque travels, horrors. Only after a Decameron of misadventures does it gradually become clear that the book's erotic register is headed for, and convincingly arrives at, the archetypal Girl of all Girls, Mommy. After the novel seems over, and we have leafed through appendices of poems and pictures, we come to a section of plain text. From the madhouse, Johnny Truant's mother writes some of the most tender, chilling faux-psychotic writing I've ever read. This dangerous, lucid, confused but very eloquent lady (the best conventional stylist in the book, by far; no doubt a sinister reflection on the interaction of lunacy and literacy) is playful, apologetic, crazed, paranoid, self-abasing, cunning -- a tigress with a gift for gab. Her section of the book does a spin away from the spatial dark and into the abyss of the maternal, of the eternal Pieta.
I detect a peculiar moral fortitude in ''House of Leaves,'' a rectitude in a way almost as archaic as that of the Gilgamesh archetype the story often explicitly reanimates. The morality of photojournalism becomes an issue. Navidson won his Pulitzer for a shot of a girl dying in the Sudan. Isn't the photographer exploiting death by letting the child die while he fusses with his lenses? Isn't observation a form of participation? If so, what does that say about us, the voyeurs of Navidson's unseeable film?
Moral questioning of our sexual malaise is also pervasive throughout the novel -- Johnny Truant seems to live up to his name -- but when we come to the details, the lists of girls and times and places, we find that the sex is almost always someone else's and we begin to suspect that Johnny is not a bona fide sleaze. Regeneration is in order for him as well as for Navidson and the other survivors of the dark.
The message they bring home is a chilling one: Fear lives in the earth, and we meet it as it rises, night after night, in place after place. That is all we can do, the only way we can distinguish our lives. Take a snapshot of the dark. Your own dark. And bring the picture home.
Robert Kelly teaches in the writing program at Bard College. Three collections of his poems have appeared in the past year: ''The Time of Voice,'' ''The Garden of Distances'' and ''Runes.''
THE NEW YORK TIMES
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