Finishing The Leaves

This book was so unsettling, so tangled, and so unnervingly powerful -- that it took me seven months to work through it.  Admittedly for most of the first four months, House of Leaves remained tightly closed with other, happier books piled on top of it.  My lonely bookmark remained tentatively tucked into the start of the second chapter.

I was initially excited to read a novel hailed by various critics with hyperbolic expressions like "most important," "most brilliant," and "most disturbing."  The last of these registered with me only as the kind of praise that accompanies any other good mystery or drama.*

On a bright spring afternoon, I read the unique introduction -- already slightly unsettled by the lonely warning on an otherwise blank page:

This is not for you.

The notion that the text of the novel is a found manuscript added a layer of disorientation to my reading.  The manuscript was said to have been written by a blind man, and it concerned a film about a mysterious house whose interior dimensions were just a little bit bigger than they should have been.  The idea that the author was just a drug-addled tattoo artist who was slipping into madness just by reading the words I now read really turned up the intensity, and I noticed a rising anxiety within me.  I felt cold and light-headed, and a knot moved from my throat to my stomach.

After a peek into the second chapter, I slammed they ill-sized cover** closed and turned on all the lights in my house.  I busied myself with small tasks and chores before bedtime, but my anxiety grew into a swollen, nameless dread.  I had progressed so slightly into the narrative of the book, that I knew that I couldn't have been responding to actual plot or concepts.  My response could only have been to the subtleties of language, of theme...of text.

I couldn't sleep with the book in my apartment, and I literally locked it outside that night.  I slept with the lights on -- and then: fitfully.

I gave the book away to a friend who scoffed and my emotional response to something as harmless as a few leaves of paper.  I felt silly, but I was glad to be rid of it.

Until I found it one morning sitting in my apartment again!

I called the friend to whom I'd given it, and she just laughed, "I didn't like it.  I dropped it off last time I was at your house."

I re-read the page that had stopped me last time, and felt my stomach twist.  I gave the book away again to someone else.

And yet I couldn't stop thinking about it.  I read about it all over the web.  I read reviews and essays and analyses.  I realized I was being silly, and I went to the bookstore to buy a fresh, full-color version.  If I was going to conquer this thing, I wanted to do so with blue houses and red Minotaurs.

At the bookstore check-stand, the portly clerk gave me a wide-eyed look.  "Oh my God," she said.  "This is the scariest book I've ever read.  Good luck.  I can't finish it."  She handed me my receipt, "And frankly, I'm glad you're getting it out of my store."

So that's when I tucked my bookmark into Chapter II and buried the fresh copy under other, less threatening books.

For

     the

          whole

               summer.

I finished over a dozen other books.  I reviewed some of them in my last post.  Then I even tackled Infinite Jest, which was so epic I'll be approaching it in an article of its own.  I finished book after book, and every time I reached past House of Leaves.

Until one day I didn't.

I cracked the binding, sat back and drank it in.  And I loved it.

But I made a rule for myself:  I read only two hours at a time -- and only before noon.  That way I had plenty of hours of daylight to digest and distract before turning the lights off to fall asleep alone in my house.

It worked for the most part.  My waking hours had none of the vague dread I experienced the first time around, though I still sometimes felt something lurking behind me.  Some void -- some darkness.***  My nights were harder, but I was cheered by my progress, and I kept going.

I generally read about 400 or 450 words of fiction per minute.  At over 200,000 words, House of Leaves should demand about 8 hours of reading.  But something about the twists and turns of that labyrinth tends to stretch time and absorb hours.  You'll have to open a copy for yourself to appreciate the way the author uses incredibly creative formatting to tell his story.  Swirling text to spin and disorient.  Lonely, spread-out text to quicken the pace.  Blacked-out and struck text to hide or reveal meaning.  Colored text to...well what the hell is the deal with the colors?  Codes, ciphers, and acrostics.  And the notes:  Pages and pages of footnotes and end notes.  Some of the notes reference other notes.  Some send the reader leaping forward or backward in the book.  Some refer to nothing that I could find.****  I was lost among those leaves for months.  

Until I suddenly found myself safely on the other side.  The house just dissolved away and I was done.  And though I've read every word between those too-small covers, I know I have missed most of the codes and surprises lurking in those ashy hallways.  Yet somehow I feel like the answers are already within me.  I feel the story swirling in my mind realigning itself with a tremendous roar.  It's different every time I turn around.‡

*I was naive.

**The pages of this book were a little bit bigger than they should have been.

***But how can darkness have claws and teeth?

****Missing - Ed.

†The Navidson Record. Dir. Will Navidson. Miramax, 1993. Film.

‡And I feel compelled to return.