Mark Danielewski’s first novel House of Leaves is largely an empty shell — albeit cleverly ornamented with many onion-layers of allegory, wordplay, text ciphers, typographic ingenuity, Wallace-esque footnotes, postmodernist fourth-wall conceits, and a suffocating sense of dread — which asks reader to imprint their own paranoid musings and fantasies to power the somewhat threadbare plot. And as such it’s a rousing success, so much so that I was thrilled to hear on Friday that SuperWife ordered us Danielewski’s new book Only Revolutions, which arrived today.
I’m looking forward to reading it after FC6 gets released, although I’m not sure “reading” is the right term for a densely crypto-typo-graphic love story cum road novel told in free verse. “Experiencing” sounds better.