House of Leaves

I’ve been reading House of Leaves recently.

It might just be a symptom of my terminally online teenage years but everything I’ve ever heard has led me to believe it would be like reading James Joyce or Pynchon. It's not.

I’m enjoying it quite a lot. But that might be because I was expecting to be tortured like Finnegans Wake and it's actually more like Kane Parsons mixed with Chuck Palahniuk.

It does the Tolkien thing of switching characters just when things start gaining momentum a lot. Which if I was younger would get on my nerves. As a 38 year old withered husk of a man it just makes me chuff a small amount of air through my nose and smile wryly.

I compare the Johnny sections to Sam and Frodo’s dreary trudge through the wastelands or Mordor. We keep getting pulled from the enthralling mystery of the house to a deeply flawed human being struggling through an existential crisis (Gollum or Frodo, take your pick) only instead of Lembas bread, all Johnny consumes is women.

I can’t tell if it's because it was written in the 90’s or maybe I have unrealistic expectations but every Johnny chapter is some new sexual encounter which ends with either liminal horror or depression and all I can think about is “this guy gets laid a lot for someone whose hygiene habits are questionable and apparently struggles to string a sentence together in front of someone he finds attractive”.

If being smelly and unable to speak to women was an aphrodisiac in the real world, my life in high school would have looked very different.

I really like the meta degradation of the formatting alongside the twisting of the dimension of the house. Obviously this has all been discussed before and nothing I’m saying is new but it's a nice feeling to be reading what's supposed to be a “challenging” book and finding it’s just a twisty thriller with some fun gimmicks. (I’m assuming fans of HoL would not like me referring to the meta formatting choices as gimmicks).

The interactivity of the book is great and it always brings a smile to my face when I have to flip between pages and turn the book upside down just to read some obscure footnote. My wife thinks I’m insane for enjoying a book that actively fights being read but I would be lying if I said it didn’t add palpable tension to the sense of warped dimensions and impossible spaces that the house embodies.

This isn’t a review as such, no one needs my opinion on House of Leaves. If someone asked I’d say it’s excellent, but only for a specific kind of person. I haven’t actually finished it yet so wouldn’t be able to properly review it anyway. Although a partially read review does kind of fit with the book's ethos.