Danielewski, Mark Z. 1966–

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Danielewski, Mark Z. 1966–

PERSONAL:

Born 1966; son of Tad Danielewski (a filmmaker). Education: Yale University, B.A., 1988; University of California, Los Angeles, M.A., 1993.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Los Angeles, CA.

CAREER:

Writer and novelist. Worked variously as a tutor, plumber, and in restaurants.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Young Lions Fiction Award, 2001, for House of Leaves; National Book Award for fiction shortlist, 2006, for Only Revolutions.

WRITINGS:

House of Leaves (novel), Pantheon (New York, NY), 2000, portions expanded and published as The Whalestoe Letters, edited by Pelafina H. Lièvre, foreword by Waldon D. Wyrtha, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2000.

Only Revolutions (novel), Pantheon (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Mark Z. Danielewski, son of the late filmmaker, Tad Danielewski, is the author of an avantgarde first novel, House of Leaves. Danielewski told Michael Sims of BookPage that his father "had been steeped in the 1950s, the literature of the modernists. So certainly the discussions of Freud and Nietzsche and Borges and Sartre were all part of what we discussed and fought about." Danielewski wrote his first book at age ten, nearly four hundred pages about a boy who grows up to become a cocaine addict in New York City and ends up in prison. His parents found it disturbing. He later showed it to a high school teacher who rejected it as being "dirty" because of his use of four-letter words. Because of these and similar experiences, Danielewski became reluctant to show his work to anyone else.

House of Leaves appeared in installments on the Internet before it was published in print form. Sims wrote that "it's difficult to imagine a more original and distinctive novel." Danielewski uses multiple typefaces for his narrators and hundreds of footnotes. He sometimes runs his text at an angle or sideways, and includes music, poetry, collages, lists, and a passage from Homer in five languages. "While these narrative games are all good fun, House of Leaves adds up to more than playfulness," wrote Sims. "As it should be in such a nightmarish fantasy, what appears to be a barrier is actually a gateway. Like Joyce and Proust, Danielewski isn't rejecting narration as much as customizing and turbo-charging it."

Library Journal reviewer Jim Dwyer called House of Leaves "simultaneously a highly literary work and an absolute hoot." Newsweek contributor Malcolm Jones felt that the book "is surprisingly fun to read, a sort of postmodern fun house where the reader becomes the author's partner in putting the story together. Like Dave Eggers's hit memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, House of Leaves comments on itself as it goes along. It is also flat-out terrifying. Think of it as The Blair Witch Project with footnotes."

In the novel, photojournalist Will Navidson, his wife, Karen Green, and their two children move into a Virginia farmhouse on Ash Tree Lane. The interior dimensions of the house are larger than the outside dimensions. Passageways and closets appear, walls move, and Will brings in a crew headed by explorer Holloway Roberts to enter the abyss. During a series of expeditions, they find a network of stairways and halls which shift and change. "The story of these expeditions interacts with an account of Navidson's relationship with Karen, from whom he ventures and tries to return," explained Robert Kelly in the New York Times Book Review. "Karen, painfully transiting from cover girl to soccer mom (or, for a harsher critic, one female cliché to another), exudes bafflement, tenderness, rage. Her character is finally as amorphous as the dark spaces within the house. For it is her house too, and one reading of this book might suggest that these perilous, seductive abysses can be probed like the feminine psyche itself, that they represent the Other Woman whom the jealous Karen sees her husband constantly attending." Kelly described House of Leaves as "a story about a story about a story about a film about a house with a black hole in it."

"Danielewski ends up dealing with the age-old theme of ‘the enemy within’ in an extremely current way," averred Nathan Matteson on Weekly Wire. "At the risk of befouling Conrad, perhaps a better title would've been House of Blair's Heart of Darkness." A Publishers Weekly reviewer who called the novel "a surreal palimpsest of terror and erudition, surely destined for cult status," also declared that "the story of the house is stitched together from disparate accounts…. This potentially cumbersome device actually enhances the horror of the tale, rather than distracting from it."

Will decides to film the whole experience, and his notes, titled "The Navidson Report," end up in the hands of an old blind man named Zampano. When Zampano dies, the papers are found by the narrator, Johnny Truant, who works in a tattoo parlor. Truant continues to work on the manuscript, and through his footnotes, the reader learns of his discovery of the papers and his own experiences with sex and drugs. "This work is a kaleidoscopically layered and deconstructed H.P. Lovecraft-style horror story," appraised Eric Robbins in Booklist. Danielewski's sister, the singer known as Poe, released an album titled Hauntings as a complement to her brother's novel.

Later in 2000, Danielewski and his publisher issued The Whalestoe Letters, a short, but self-contained, expanded section from House of Leaves. The book consists of "a collection of letters from an institutionalized mother to her wayward son," noted a reviewer in Book. The work "seems to give voice to a powerfully influential mother" who before had only occupied the appendix of House of Leaves, the Book critic remarked.

In his next novel, Only Revolutions, Sam and Hailey are perpetually sixteen years old during a two-hundredyear trek through time. Traveling on the open road in a succession of contemporary vehicles, from a Model T to a Mustang, Hailey and Sam tell their story in carefully constructed eight-page increments, each consisting of 180 words of free verse and rich wordplay. Accompanying the protagonists' narration are other cultural and literary fragments, including news reports, sports headlines, historical facts, and other slices of day-to-day life that create a context, and a subtext, for the pair's fast-paced story. The narrative is enhanced by the actual physical structure of the book; the reader is asked to read one section of Sam's story, then flip the book over to read eight pages of Hailey's story, and so on until the end. Eventually, the two distinct narratives meet in the middle of the book, at the momentous events that occurred in Dealey Plaza in November, 1963. As the story unfolds, Sam and Hailey engage in an "almost endless pursuit of love and liberty," observed Library Journal reviewer Jim Dwyer, even as they struggle against individuals and outside forces that threaten their ongoing wild joyride. The book "begins as a standard exercise in narrative gamesmanship—frames within frames, narrators you perhaps ought not rely upon—and emerges as a sui generis art project where, as in a concrete poem, the very text scatters and dances and moves the action along," remarked Troy Patterson in the New York Times Book Review. A Kirkus Reviews critic commented, "there's a real story here, and a persuasive sense that the couple's wild ride is a kind of creation myth that mirrors, as it presumes to explain." New Statesman critic named the book a "feat of typographical engineering, with dazzling prose crafted around multiple characters."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Book, January, 2001, "Almost Famous: Mark Z. Danielewski and Sister Poe Get on the Bus," p. 11; July 1, 2001, "Keeping the Young Guns Loaded," p. 12.

Booklist, March 1, 2000, Eric Robbins, review of House of Leaves; September 1, 2006, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Only Revolutions, p. 51.

Book World, October 22, 2006, "Spin Cycle: Two Teens Light out in This Head-turning Puzzle Novel," review of Only Revolutions, p. 13.

Entertainment Weekly, September 8, 2006, Gilbert Cruz, review of Only Revolutions, p. 164.

Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2006, review of Only Revolutions, p. 6; July 15, 2006, review of Only Revolutions, p. 689.

Library Journal, February 15, 2000, Jim Dwyer, review of House of Leaves, p. 195; September 1, 2006, Jim Dwyer, review of Only Revolutions, p. 135.

Los Angeles Times, September 13, 2006, August Brown, "An Outsider Novelist Goes, Er, Traditional," review of Only Revolutions.

New Statesman, September 4, 2006, David Vascott, "Mirror, Mirror," review of Only Revolutions, p. 59.

Newsweek, March 20, 2000, Malcolm Jones, "A Spooky but Literary ‘Blair Witch Project’: The Author Turns Writing—Literally—Upside Down," review of House of Leaves, p. 71.

New York Times Book Review, March 26, 2000, Robert Kelly, "Home Sweet Hole"; review of House of Leaves, p. 9; November 5, 2006, Troy Patterson, "Complete 360," review of Only Revolutions, p. 24.

Publishers Weekly, January 24, 2000, review of House of Leaves, p. 291; August 28, 2006, review of Only Revolutions, p. 31.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 2000, Michael Hemmingson, review of House of Leaves, p. 134.

Times Literary Supplement, September 8, 2006, "Spongies Bashing," p. 20.