I liked Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. It was spooky and about the right level of challenging.
But his next novel, Only Revolutions, I don't know. It's about two young lovers who take off in a car and after that you're guess is as good as mine. The book is two-sided, with each of the main characters starting their narrative at one end and finishing up at the other. That is, I guess, supposed to provide alternating perspectives on the same events. Unfortunately almost nothing either character says makes sense, so that's kind of a bust.
What happened here? Did Danielewski take a heavy dose of acid, ramble into a tape recorder, and then say, "Fuck it, that's my new book"? Was he told that he could be the next James Joyce, and interpret that as "Be less coherent"? Maybe the film rights negotiations for House of Leaves bored him so he responded by a book no sane film studio would want to adapt?
Still, I'm glad it was published. Better too much leeway than too little.
2 comments:
Your post is a tricky one for me to answer for the reason that I started to read House of Leaves but was unable to get beyond my fifty page limit, if that. I'm not a fan of horror stories in general so it was a factor but beyond that it was the dense formatting that put me off. Maybe I just wasn't ready to make the effort it would take to decipher the footnotes, colored text, and the varying font styles. Although HoL is a favorite of Jer's because it's so unique, it was a bit too dense for me.
I understand why you found Only Revolutions obscure because the narrative structure sounds pretty irritating but I can't judge modern experimental novels and this one sounds like a prime example. Maybe he should have read Jack Kerouac's On the Road before sending the manuscript to the publisher.
When we talked about your piece this morning Susannah Clarke's name came up as someone who didn't follow up after writing a great novel. So I looked her up to see what had happened only to discover an article in the NYT last year called:
Susanna Clarke Wrote a Hit Novel Set in a Magical Realm. Then She Disappeared.
It turns out she became very ill with odd symptoms shortly after Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was published and after she'd been asked to write a follow-up novel. Severely depressed, she was unable to do so then. Now more than twenty years later there's a book called Piranesi that sounds interesting enough that I may buy a copy.. that will give me a reason to reread the first one. It is a beauty and thanks for the recommendation.
A lot of it comes down to a matter of taste. Some people like pastel drawings or string quartets, while others don't. I found House of Leaves fascinating because it put the haunted house story together with a lot of modernist kinds of techniques in a new way. The form of the story and the content of the story fed off of each other to create something no one had done before. Whether it could still be published and make the same kind of splash today, I don't know, but there are still readers for it.
On the other hand, experimentation has to start somewhere, and preferably somewhere identifiable. If I can't make any sense at all out of the first sentence and none of the sentences immediately following it clear things up, I'll soon lose patience. From what I understand, Kerouac spent years planning and plotting On the Road but then wrote the novel that wound up getting published in one go. Interesting method.
I read Piranesi a few months back. I found it interesting. It's different in tone and form from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. That's probably for the best. It may have taken her some years to find an idea that inspired her to do something that wasn't just a copy of her best-known work. She did publish a short story collection back in 2006 called The Ladies of Grace Adieu. I couldn't tell you what it's like since I haven't read it. From what I've heard elsewhere it sounds like material left over from Strange & Norrell. Anyway, I hope you like Piranesi. Got a feeling you might.
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