Random thoughts on House Of Leaves

House Of Leaves is a bit of a masterpiece, I think. Set in rural Virginia in the not too distant past, it’s a modern haunted house tale. The story concerns a traveling photographer and his wife and two children. They move into a house in the woods, far from the madness of the urban northeast. Slowly he begins to relax into a life with no foreign assignments or long stays overseas, partly by documenting his family’s move on film. Everything changes rapidly one day when, with family and a friend present, he films a door that has appeared in his living room leading into a hallway. Without giving too much away, the five and a half minute hallway is just the beginning.
I’m rereading it now, and I’m having two ideas about it. Both ideas concern things that most of us don’t take seriously but as children develop often unhealthy obsessions with. The first is time travel. When I was a kid I really liked the Back To The Future movies. I would get hung up on the physics of it all though, which led to a summer spent giving myself an amateur education (and a headache) in quantum physics. From time to time even now I’ll have dreams or waking fantasies about being able to slide effortlessly from decade to decade. Imagine not only reading about the D-Day landings, or the fall of the Berlin wall, or the first Thanksgiving. Or visiting your hometown 40 years from now, or getting the financial section of the newspaper from two weeks in the future so you can dump some stock before it tanks. It’s thoughts like these that can feed a curious imagination for days on end, the tendrils of them sneaking into daily experiences and making fun out of the tedious. House Of Leaves deals instead with travel within one’s own house, remembering of course that in dreams houses represent our own lives.
As our lives expand and stretch ever onward it gets harder and harder to remember experiences as vividly as we once did. Though modern science deals in cold technicalities when it talks about time travel–explaining in graphic detail the quantum necessities and multiple universes of time dilation–sometimes the most fun is thinking about travel within ones own life. It’s the most obvious wish after all, especially for anyone who ever flubbed a line in the school play or said something we really didn’t mean in an argument. We long to live in a world without paradoxes, where not only is every possibility happening at once but is available to us like items on a menu. It isn’t possible of course, and wishing isn’t planning, but we go on wishing anyway.
The other thing I’ve been thinking of is the need we have to be scared, if only to be saved. I tormented myself with the commercials from horror movies when I was little. Something about the experience of seeing a movie made it real to me, and so the movie trailers seemed more like teasers for documentaries than harmless entertainments. As these movies wind up on cable in my late twenties I can’t help but chuckle my way through them, thinking about the way they used to rearrange my sleep patterns and keep my poor parents awake manning the drinking glass. I’m not above being terrified every now and then, but as an adult we learn an ability to talk ourselves down. A minute with the light on thinking about tomorrow’s meeting can put the nightmare at a safe distance now, and in some small way deep down we feel proud of our ability to self-console. Soon fear is gone almost completely, and danger or excitement leads to disbelief instead of the old fashioned terror.
Anyway, I say all this partly to empty my head of the logorrhea before I go to sleep and partly to recommend this book. Even for the steadfast it will take several passes; it’s well footnoted, in four or five languages and at least five typefaces. Hell, even some of the footnotes have footnotes. But past all the pseudo-Nabokavian tricks there’s a great story, and perhaps a little window into some things you never knew about the kid you see in the mirror every morning.~