House of Leaves
HadThe Blair Witch Projectbeen a book instead of a  film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by  Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors ofBlastat their most avant-garde, the result might have been something  likeHouse of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel has a lot  going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph calledThe Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampanò, about a nonexistent documentary film--which itself is about a photojournalist  who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.) In addition to this Russian-doll layering of narrators, Danielewski packs  in poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, appendices of fake correspondence and "various quotes," single lines of prose placed any  which way on the page, crossed-out passages, and so on.Now that we've reached the post-postmodern era, presumably there's  nobody left who needs liberating from the strictures of conventional fiction.  So apart from its narrative high jinks, what doesHouse of Leaveshave to offer? According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampanò's work, once you readThe Navidson Record,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.We'll have to take his word for it, however. As it's presented here,  the description of the spooky film isn't continuous enough to have much  scare power. Instead, we're pulled back into Johnny Truant's world through  his footnotes, which he uses to discharge everything in his head, including  the discovery of the manuscript, his encounters with people who knew  Zampanò, and his own battles with drugs, sex, ennui, and a vague evil  force. IfThe Navidson Recordis a mad professor lecturing on the  supernatural with rational-seeming conviction, Truant's footnotes are the manic  student in the back of the auditorium, wigged out and furiously scribbling whoa-dude notes about life.Despite his flaws, Truant is an appealingly earnest amateur editor--finding translators, tracking down sources, pointing out incongruities.  Danielewski takes an academic's--or ex-academic's--glee in footnotes (the  similarity to David Foster Wallace is almost too obvious to mention), as well as  other bogus ivory-tower trappings such as interviews with celebrity scholars  like Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom. And he stuffs highbrow and pop-culture references (and parodies) into the novel with the enthusiasm of an anarchist filling a pipe bomb with bits of junk metal.House of Leavesmay not be the  prettiest or most coherent collection, but if you're trying to blow stuff up,  who cares?--John Ponyicsanyi--This text refers to thePaperbackedition.